Assam presents a prism of exclusion these days. The BJP state government led by Himant Biswa Sarma has kicked off a major eviction drive in this north eastern state in the past month raising troubling questions.
At least, 3,300 families have been evicted from forest land, grazing land and government revenue land. It encompasses districts of Dhubri, Lakhimpur, Nalbari and and Paikan reserve forest in Goalpara.
These drives have been stated to be carrying out a Guwahati High Court order in reclaiming encroached land to minimise man-animal conflict. Yet the execution of these drives and the polarizing political rhetoric surrounding them underline a troubling reality.
The prism of inclusion seems to have been given a go by in recent past in Assam. The eviction drives underscore it.
Environmental degradation, land management and deep seated anxieties around migration are apparently the motive of the state government. These have cropped up since Partition and creation of Bangladesh.
And such concerns of ruling dispensation of the state cannot be dismissed as baseless.According to a report of Union ministry of Environment, Assam has the highest percentage of encroachment of land after Madhya Pradesh.
What is uncalled for is weaponising these concerns to target specific communities. Most eviction drives have been targeted on areas inhabited by Bengali-origin Muslims.
Obviously, these persons speak Bengali. Hence chief minister Sarma’s comment that those speaking Bengali are not sons of soil of Assam betraying a bias and ignorance giving a handle to his party’s political opponents in West Bengal.
It has also landed BJP in a soup in Sarma’s neighbouring state. But more of it later.
Over the past few weeks, chief minister Sarma has spoken of “demographic invasion’ by “people of one religion” and of “land jihad’. He has also voiced his determination to “protect Assamese constituencies” in places where “an effort has started to change the demography of Upper Assam’.
Such disturbing diatribes are not being voiced for the first time. The rhetoric stands to transform administrative action into communal performance.
It recasts vulnerable citizens as outsiders. Over 50,000 people have been evicted and 1.19 lakh acres of land have been reclaimed since Sarma came to power in 2021, according to state government of Assam.
There is a marked absence of humane policy response. Many of the evicted are displaced victims of river erosion, economic marginalization or historical neglect.
Assembly elections are a year away in Assam..In this backdrop, the campaign against outsiders have gained political urgency.
It seems electoral arithmetic is overriding constitutional responsibility and due process. The notion of justice is bulldozed when the state trades empathy for political expediency .
