In valley the exploitation of religious trust lands through banking loopholes reveals not merely an opportunistic elite, but a chain of complicity stretching from revenue offices to bank counters
I Ahmad Wani
In 1992, Harshad Mehta exposed something far more disturbing than personal greed. He exposed a system so riddled with structural loopholes that ambition, dressed in institutional respectability, could plunder public trust with remarkable precision. Three decades later, in the heart of Srinagar’s Sonwar locality, a quieter but no less consequential drama is unfolding. It deserves to be examined not as a property dispute requiring administrative correction, but as a case study in how power, manufactured piety, banking vulnerability, and official complicity converge to dispossess those with the least capacity to fight back.
Adjacent to the prestigious Burn Hall School, prime land parcels belonging to the historic Durga Naag Temple Trust, measuring over 16 kanals across multiple survey numbers, have allegedly been drawn into a web of mortgage, corporate default, and insolvency proceedings. The leasehold rights, originally granted to Ansari Motors, were reportedly mortgaged to Punjab National Bank to secure loans for Highland Automobiles Private Limited. When the firms defaulted on dues reportedly between thirty and sixty crore rupees, the matter arrived before the National Company Law Tribunal at Chandigarh, where a liquidator was appointed for asset recovery. The registered office of the defaulting firm was, by then, operating under the name Ansari Complex, a commercial automobile showroom constructed, if the allegations hold, upon the foundation of sacred endowment land.
The Harshad Mehta parallel is not rhetorical flourish. Mehta exploited the inter-bank receipts system, a legitimate financial instrument, to redirect depositor money into private speculation. What allegedly transpired in Sonwar follows a structurally identical logic. Leasehold rights over religious endowment property were used as collateral, passed through banking channels that appear not to have asked sufficiently hard questions, ultimately entangling a public sector bank’s depositor money in liabilities arising from disputed sacred land. Punjab National Bank, the same institution that later became synonymous with the Nirav Modi fraud, finds itself holding exposure it may struggle to recover.
But here a question must be asked directly, the kind that institutional press releases rarely entertain. A lease over religious trust land does not become valid bank collateral by accident. It requires paperwork. It requires valuation. It requires an officer to sign, a file to move, and a sanction to be recorded. At every stage of that process, someone with authority and accountability sat across the table. Revenue officials who certified land records, bank officers who accepted disputed leasehold rights as secured assets, trust administrators who either approved or chose not to question the transactions, and legal professionals who gave these arrangements documentary form. None of this architecture of exploitation assembles itself. It is built, brick by brick, by individuals who understood precisely what they were doing and calculated that the consequences would fall on someone else.
This is part of a pattern that runs deeper than any single survey number or insolvency file. The Raghu Nath Ji Temple in Barzulla presents perhaps the most egregious illustration. Over 159 kanals of temple land, valued at nearly four hundred crore rupees, faced systematic encroachment by influential local figures including, it was alleged, the family of a former President of the Jammu and Kashmir Bar Association, who reportedly constructed over two dozen residential structures and a place of worship on disputed endowment property. The Jammu and Kashmir High Court, citing rampant misuse, ordered restitution and transferred management to the Deputy Commissioner of Srinagar. That prolonged litigation was required before the powerful were checked speaks to the asymmetry between elite impunity and common accountability that has defined the administration of religious trusts in this region for decades.
The Narayan Matth at Solina, the Sharika Devi Temple, and numerous other shrines carry similar complaints. In May 2025, allegations of land mafia encroachment accompanied by threats to caretakers surfaced at the Narayan Matth. The Jammu and Kashmir High Court has, in recent months, transferred management of at least nine prominent religious sites to district magistrates, explicitly citing militancy era apathy and official indifference as the conditions that made encroachment possible. The 2012 temple land scandal, in which properties worth thousands of crores allegedly transferred to private hands at nominal rates during and after the Pandit exodus of 1990, remains unresolved in any meaningful judicial or administrative sense.
What unites these cases is not only a particular category of elite actor but the network of institutional enablers without whom the enterprise would collapse at the first legal hurdle. Consider what a successful misappropriation of religious trust land actually demands. A revenue official must certify or overlook irregularities in land records. A bank officer must process a loan against collateral that due diligence should have flagged. A trust administrator must remain conveniently silent. A legal practitioner must draft documents that give the transaction a veneer of legitimacy. An auditor must look away. Each of these individuals draws a government salary or a professional fee. Each operates under a regulatory framework that demands scrutiny. And yet the files move, the loans are sanctioned, and the sacred becomes commercial. The businessman at the centre of such a transaction is visible. The officials who made it possible are not. That invisibility is itself a policy failure of the first order.
What further unites these cases is a particular category of actor at the top of the chain. They are not crude land grabbers operating in obscurity. They are businessmen with legislative connections, clerics with commercial portfolios, lawyers with institutional reach, and trust administrators accountable to no independent oversight body. They attend civic functions, fund religious congregations, deliver addresses on community solidarity, and present themselves as custodians of Kashmir’s pluralistic heritage. Kashmiriyat is their public vocabulary. Real estate is their private ledger. The duality is not incidental. Respectability provides cover, institutional access provides opportunity, and a banking system insufficiently vigilant about the provenance of collateral provides the mechanism.
The human cost requires no embellishment. Religious endowments in Kashmir were constituted to serve community welfare, sustaining the poor, preserving heritage, and educating the young. When these properties are instead leveraged to finance automobile franchises and private commercial complexes, the loss falls disproportionately on those with the least recourse. Displaced Kashmiri Pandits, who endured the exodus of 1990, return to find ancestral shrines commercialised or encroached, deepening alienation and complicating any prospect of rehabilitation. For the Muslim resident of the same locality, the corrosion is moral. Faith becomes a commodity, institutional trust collapses, and economic benefit flows steadily upward while local communities inherit the residue.
Forensic audits of all temple trust transactions since the early 1990s are a starting point, not a conclusion. Digitisation and public disclosure of trust land records would eliminate the opacity that enables this category of misuse. Central investigating agencies must examine not only the primary beneficiaries of these transactions but the revenue officials who certified land records, the bank officers who sanctioned loans against disputed assets, and the intermediaries who provided legal and professional cover. The chain of accountability cannot end with the most visible name. It must extend to every signature on every file that allowed sacred land to become a balance sheet entry.
Harshad Mehta, when confronted, argued that he had merely exploited what the system permitted. That defence did not exonerate him before the law or before public conscience. Those who have allegedly turned Kashmir’s sacred lands into instruments of private enrichment, and those in revenue offices, bank branches, and legal chambers who made it administratively possible, deserve no more generous a hearing. The question this valley must now put to its institutions is the same one India asked in 1992. How many signatures on how many files must accumulate before those responsible for oversight decide that accountability is not optional?
