Tribals in the Khunti parliamentary constituency of Jharkhand feel that the Narendra Modi government at the Centre plans to loot their lands for big industrialists, claim rights outfits.

Members of Loktantra Bachao Abhiyan (save democracy campaign) — a collective effort of rights outfits and social workers in Jharkhand — have started a yatra across all the 14 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state.

The members on Friday interacted with villagers in Khunti, which is the birthplace of tribal icon Birsa Munda and had been visited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this year.

Union tribal affairs and agriculture minister Arjun Munda is the sitting MP of Khunti.

“The villagers said during interactions that in the last 10 years there have been attacks on their water, forests, land and minerals. We informed them that by the amendment of the Forest Conservation Act, the Modi government had decided to snatch away the rights of the gram sabha over the forests and hand them over to the capitalists,” claimed Manthan, a campaign member.

“The BJP government had snatched away 22 lakh acres of community land of the gram sabha by creating a land bank. Now preparations are underway to create a similar forest bank. Through the Land Ownership Card Scheme, a conspiracy has been hatched to snatch the public land of the village from the control of the villagers and to abolish the Fifth Schedule, CNT-SPT law and the Khunkatti system (tribal practice of ownership of land among families of the same clan who cleared the forest and made land cultivable),” said a release issued by the campaign members.

“Speakers alleged that the Modi government is looting the land of tribals and giving it to corporates. And in return, these companies are giving him support in elections. Recently, this corruption has been exposed after the Supreme Court declared the Modi government’s electoral bond scheme unconstitutional. Using this scheme, the BJP has secretly taken election donations of more than Rs 10,000 crore from corporate houses,” alleged the release of the campaign members.

“The tribal villagers were unanimous that the Modi government should be defeated in the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls,” said Manthan.

Arjun Munda won the constituency by a slender margin of 1,445 votes, defeating the Congress’s Kalicharan Munda in the 2019 polls.