The Valley’s seven-party alliance on Tuesday said Jammu and Kashmir owes the absence of farmer suicides and starvation deaths to the land laws that were scrapped last week, launching a counter-narrative a day after the government claimed they were “outdated, regressive and anti-people”.

People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration, which includes major political parties like the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party and is fighting for restoration of Article 370, said on Tuesday the official claims on the land laws are “a bundle of lies” aimed “to hoodwink people”.

The government on Monday broke its silence on the growing outrage against the new land laws that allowed outsiders to buy land in J&K.

The government has been trying hard to prove these laws were for the good of the people, although the perception here is that they are aimed at changing the Muslim-majority status of the state. The government is even facing opposition from Jammu’s Hindu belt where many people claim these laws were an assault on the Dogra culture.

A People’s Alliance spokesman said on Tuesday that the government clarification was a “bizarre attempt to distort facts, weave lies and mislead people”.

“The alliance has termed the (old) land laws regime of Jammu and Kashmir as most progressive, pro-people and pro-farmer in entire Indian subcontinent,” a statement said.

“Jammu and Kashmir was first in the country to implement the concept of ‘land to tiller’ by enacting Big Landed Estates Abolition Act, 1952, followed by Agrarian Reforms Act, 1976, restricting the land holding to twelve and half acres and ending the exploitative practice of ‘absentee landlordism’,” it said.

The spokesman said anybody calling the old land laws archaic would be “guilty of ignorance of the history of Jammu and Kashmir”.

“It is because of the timely land reforms that there are no starvation deaths… No farmer suicides have been ever reported from Jammu and Kashmir and everyone in Jammu and Kashmir has available three fundamental necessities — food, clothing and shelter, the position that is now sought to be reversed by making massive assault on the land law regime,” the statement said.

Experts claim the 100-year-old Dogra rule in J&K had turned the Dogra and Kashmiri Pandit landlords into owners of a majority of land in the princely state and a vast majority of Muslims were reduced to tenants.

Official figures reveal the laws introduced by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah as “Prime Minister” of J&K had by March 1953 transferred 188,775 acres of land to 153,399 tillers, a majority of them Muslim but many low-caste Hindus.

The alliance statement said the real object of repeal of the basic land laws and massive amendments to the other laws is “to push in and implement the agenda of effecting demographic change and disempowering the people of Jammu and Kashmir”.

“How can Alienation of Land Act be termed as archaic when it prohibited transfer of land to a non-State Subject thus protecting the interests of Permanent Residents of Jammu and Kashmir and at the same time made a provision for transfer of land by mortgage to organisations like Industrial Development Bank of India, Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India to keep pace with industrial development,” the statement said.

“The repeal of the act now allows the land to be transferred to non-State Subjects, denuding the residents of Jammu and Kashmir of their most precious rights. The claimed protection of rights in agricultural land, it is stated, is mere eyewash as the amendment introduced in Land Revenue Act provides for permission to sell the agricultural land almost at mere asking without difficulty,” it added.

The government claimed on Monday that the new laws afford protection to over 90 per cent of the land in J&K, claiming agricultural land could not be sold to outsiders.

The alliance claimed that “the abolition of Big Landed Estates Abolition Act, 1952, and amendments in Agrarian Reforms Act, 1976, is against farmers and to remove the ceiling on acquisition”.

The new rules also allow the government, on the request of an army officer not below the rank of corps commander, declare an area as “strategic area within a local area”, for direct operational and training requirements of armed forces. The government said on Monday that they were applicable to the army’s “own/legally acquired lands”.

The alliance spokesman said the “security zones” are being created with the exclusion of “oversight by expert bodies, environmental activists and civil society groups” and were bound “to put at peril ecosystem in fragile environmental areas like Gulmarg, Pahalgam and Sonamarg already under pressure beyond their carrying capacity”.