By Krishna Jha
There is little doubt the Bharatiya Janata Party government led by chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is determined to turn Assam into a communally torn state. The state has been witnessing a systematic persecution of Muslims. Although the attack and harassment of minorities has become a common phenomenon in most of the BJP-ruled states, these are happening with a sickening regularity in Assam.
As per media reports, a minimum of 3,300 families, mostly Muslims, have been displaced in last one month alone because of the government’s eviction drive in multiple districts in Assam.
Only last Saturday, on July 12, houses of hundreds of Muslim families of Bidyapara village in Assam’s Goalpara district were razed down by bulldozer. In the absence of any proper rehabilitation plan, victims quietly vacated their houses and went away with their belongings.
Early in July, around 1,400 Muslim families were displaced during an eviction drive in the Dhubri district of Assam. The habitats of these Muslim families of Bengali origin were bulldozed by the state government to make way for a power plant. The state government has already allotted the land for the power plant project, which is headed by the Assam Power Distribution Company Limited.
According to reports, nearly 10,000 Bengali-origin Muslims, who had been living in the area for almost four decades, were affected by the BJP government’s drive to displace them from Chirakuta 1 and 2, Charuakhara Jungle Block and Santeshpur villages under the Chapar revenue circle in Dhubri.
These are essentially erosion-hit people who had lost their ancestral homes due to river Brahmaputra.
The land which has been earmarked by the district authorities for the rehabilitation of the displaced people is in a low-lying riverine area that remains flooded most of the time in monsoon. Nor does the area have any roads or lines of communications – the reason why the displaced people are reluctant to shift to the area.
Yet, the BJP government has created such a fear among these hapless members of the minority community that a significant section of them have simply moved away. And those who resisted found their houses demolished and belongings destroyed on July 8 this year. Minor protests by some of the victims were easily crushed by brutal lathi-charge by the police.
Little over a month back, in June this year, a similar demolition attack was launched on the residents of Hasila Beel village in Assam’s Goalpara district. The victims comprised over 600 families, all Bengali-origin Muslims, and the objective of the demolition drive was to vacate 1,550-bigha of wetland in the district.
As the demolition began, Goalpara DC Khanindra Chaudhury told the media persons that these families had been illegally encroaching into the government land. “This is actually a wetland, and we had issued notices both in 2023 and 2024 to the illegal encroachers to vacate, but some are still left there.”
In this case, too, the state government has made no proper rehabilitation arrangements before seeking to evict these residents of Hasila Beel village as they had been living in the area for almost six decades.
Like the Muslim victims of Dhubri district, the residents of Hasila Beel village of Goalpara have also been living in the area for decades after being affected by the river erosion in the riverine areas. In none of these cases, the government has consulted the victims and came up with a rehabilitation plan based on consensus. This is important because this is the only way a democracy works.
Even the Supreme Court has given guidelines that people cannot be evicted in this arbitrary way without making proper arrangements for their rehabilitation. But in most of these cases bulldozers are sent for eviction within a day or two after the notices are given to the victims, and the rehabilitation plan that the government offers makes only mockery of the Supreme Court guidelines. Nor are the people given enough time, and governmental support, to move their family and belongings safely to the new area.
These are not the only ways the Muslim residents of Assam have come under attack by the state’s BHP government. May of them have also been sought to be illegally stripped of their citizenship and deported to Bangladesh.
The drive to expel these so-called “illegal” migrants to Bangladesh gained momentum since May this year. During this period, the Border Security Force has sought to push nearly three hundred Muslims towards Bangladesh. And most of them were then compelled to go back to India by Bangladesh forces. In the process, they have to go through harrowing experiences with a feeling to belonging to none – neither to India nor to Bangladesh – even though they have been Indians for all practical purposes.
One of the Muslim victims, after being forced to undergo such push-backs from the two sides, told the mediapersons that “the BSF was forcing us to cross over to the other side, where as the BGB (Border Guard of Bangladesh) and Bangladesh locals said they would not take us as we were Indians.”
Recently, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told the state’s legislative assembly that nearly 300 Muslims had been sent back to Bangladesh since May. “These pushbacks will be intensified. We have to be more active and proactive to save the state,” he said.
Many of the Muslim residents of Assam have been sent to the detention centres especially created by the government for what it calls illegal migrants. Most of the victims in these detention centres are essentially undocumented migrants.
These are only few of the many instances of the ongoing persecution of Muslims in Assam. The BJP government has already set Manipur afire. Now it seems to be targeting another northeaster state. Muslims or Christians are as Indians as Hindus. The constant attack on the minorities does not augur well for India’s democracy. (IPA Service)
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