Team Herald
PANJIM: Goa Forward Party (GFP) President and Fatorda MLA Vijai Sardesai on Sunday alleged that the State government is willfully leaving out a specific definition for ‘land grabbing’, which has hampered the Commission of Inquiry, headed by Justice V K Jadhav (Retd) and helped water-down its findings.
In a statement, Vijai pointed out that the significant failure was mentioned by the commission itself, which implies attempts to scuttle the inquiry itself from the word go.
He also accused the government of shielding and protecting the real culprits that the commission referred to, in Goa’s unprecedented and large-scale land grabbing scam.
Sardesai in a tweet quoted the commission’s observations how individuals with key roles in the commission of this crime have acted “cleverly behind the curtain”, using others “as mere pawns” while orchestrating illegal land transfers using forged documents.
“This scam is not just about stolen land; it’s about stealing Goa itself from Goans,” Sardesai asserted, reiterating his belief that a nexus of powerful individuals was behind this illegal activity.
He demanded immediate action to identify and prosecute those named or implicated in the Commission’s findings, stating that it is the duty of the government to protect Goans’ rights and heritage.
“If the government fails to act now, we will take this fight to every Goan household and expose their complicity in this massive scam,” Sardesai warned and said that the Chief Minister should quit his post immediately for allegedly ‘protecting’ the culprits in the land grabbing scam.
The one-man commission, headed by Retd Justice of Bombay High Court V K Jadhav, appointed by the Goa government, had submitted its report on the land grabbing cases in the coastal state to Chief Minister Pramod Sawant last year. The report was later accepted by the State Cabinet.