By Mohd. Ismail Khan, TwoCircles.net,
Hyderabad: In continued encroachment of wakf properties, the Andhra Pradesh government is now going to usurp the 86 acre land of Dargah Syed Rohullah and Mahdavia community graveyard to construct housing for the state secretariat employees.
The A.P. government has started the construction work for the housing society that will consist of 850 houses. For the purpose, the government has taken away 86 out of 100 acres of Dargah Syed Ruhulllah in Neknampur, a suburb of the state capital Hyderabad.
The graves in the Mahdavia community wakf graveyard are as old as 400 years. The graveyard has now been razed, and old graves are being covered with huge rocks from the construction work.
This wakf property was in news even in the year 2009, when local Urdu media reported about land grabbers destroying old graves and plotting the wakf land to sell it. At that time minority affairs minister Mr. Ahmedullah, along with the then chairman of the state wakf board Ilyas Seth, and other wakf board officials visited the dargah and graveyard land and assured strict action against the land grabbers. Later the wakf property was surveyed and encroachments were removed.
But now this prime Wakf land has again become target not from the land grabbers but from that same government which promised to protect it 3 years back.
Secretariat Employees’ Cooperative Society has taken clearance from the state housing board and started construction over the 400 year old graveyard last year. The construction contractors are blowing the rocks around the wakf land to give it a shape of a plot. The blasting of rocks is seriously affecting the 400 year old structure of the dargah and 500 year old Qutub Shahi mosque adjacent to the wakf land.
Three days back a delegation of local Muslims from Neknampur met chief minister Kiran Kumar Reddy and asked him to stop the construction work on the dargah land, as dargah holds huge respect in the local Muslim community. The CM promised to stop the work three days back, but the construction work is still on, and poses huge threat to the prime wakf land and a rich heritage of Qutub Shahi culture.
Hazrat Syed Ruhullah was a sufi saint from Afghanistan, who made Hyderabad his home in the Qutub Shahi era. He died in 1686 at Fort Golconda in Hyderabad and his dargah was constructed near the fort.