Assam land encroachment is real; former CEC-led panel found 8 lakh indigenous families are landless

Somewhere in Darrang, Assam. On September 23, two civilians were killed and several people including nine policemen were injured in the clashes during an eviction drive in Darrang.

A whopping 90% of Assam’s native people out of a 3.4 crore population do not possess permanent land ownership documents or land pattas, and as many as 8 lakh families belonging to the indigenous population are completely landless. This was what an Assam government-constituted committee headed by former Chief Election Commissioner of India (CEC) Hari Shankar Brahma had to say in 2017.

According to the panel, 63 lakh bighas (20.83 lakh acres) of government land, including forest land, grazing ground and others, have been held by encroachers across the state. The panel had submitted its report to then-chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal, recommending measures to ensure protection of land rights of the state’s indigenous people.

If anything, this report corroborates claims and findings by the state’s civil society organisations, local media and independent researchers that hundreds of thousands of bighas of government land were encroached upon, mostly by suspected illegal immigrants.

At the heart of the recent controversy surrounding the death of two people in Assam was land encroachment. The state government ordered a drive to evict encroachers from 77,420 bighas of land in northern Assam’s Darrang district. The move is aimed at allowing local youth to carry out farming and afforestation under a Rs 9.6-crore project.

According to 2021-22 state budget documents, ‘Garukhuti Project’ under Sipajhar Block in Darrang district would “provide livelihood options to indigenous youth living in that area, encompassing not only modern agriculture practices but also scientific animal rearing practices”.

On September 23, when an Assam Police team reached Dhalpur-Garukhuti to evict encroachers, they were allegedly attacked by a mob armed with machetes, spears and other things. Police resorted to baton-charge and firing to disperse the attackers. Two civilians were killed and several people including nine policemen were injured in these clashes, chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told reporters in Guwahati.

Later, Sarma said that the anti-encroachment drive would continue not only in Darrang district but the rest of the state as well.

Land issue and its colonial roots

The land problem in Assam has its roots in the colonial era. That the British had brought in East Bengali peasants in hordes and allowed them to settle in the fertile valley of Assam has been well-documented by historians and researchers.

“Threats to security of the land rights and the very identity of the indigenous people of Assam has come from the sustained immigration of Bengali Muslim peasants into mainland Assam from the neighbouring districts of pre-independent Assam/erstwhile East Pakistan and now Bangladesh,” according to the HS Brahma committee report.

The committee also noted how “Sir Sayed Mahammad Sadullah's government in Assam between 1937 and 1947 devised 'Grow More Food' campaign under which thousands of Bengali Muslim peasants were unleashed to be spread in the lower Assam districts”.

According to researchers, the colonial administrators had introduced the term “wastelands” to usurp vast tracts of community grazing land, forest or marshy areas which were believed to be used to settle the East Bengali peasants.

“When the British colonised Assam post the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826, they marked public common lands as ‘wastelands’ to facilitate capitalist and imperialist exploitation,” said Shaheen Ahmed, who is pursuing her PhD at Australia’s Monash University.

“There was no capitalism in the region pre-colonialisation in the Brahmaputra Valley; hence, large amounts of lands were utilised as common village grounds. The British implemented their extraction economy policies such as tea plantations, oil fields, coal fields, wet-rice cultivation, etc., by occupying these public commons and marking them as ‘wastelands’,” she said.

“They got various settlers as various forms of labour and settled them in these lands - they got indentured labourers to work for the tea plantations, and incentivised the land to East Bengali Muslim peasants to do jute or wet-rice cultivation. Such colonial policies of marking community lands as dead, or terra-nullius or as wasteland, was standard colonial policy across the world, including Australia,” added Ahmed whose research areas include decolonisation, indigeneity, borderlands, cultures, gender and cinema.

Politics over the encroachment

The Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP-led Assam government has been criticized by the opposition over the eviction drive in Dholpur Garukhuti in Darrang district. State Congress president Bhupen Bora had said, “Assam government is behaving in an autocratic manner to evict the residents of Dholpur who have been living in the area since the 1970s. Before eviction, government should have arranged for rehabilitation and alternative housing.”

The Darrang district administration said it did offer an alternative location to rehabilitate the families, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims, but they are reluctant to shift there claiming it’s a flood-prone area.

Darrang deputy commissioner Prabhati Thaosen did not respond to an email seeking her comment.

The fact is, this is not the first time that the state government has ordered eviction in Darrang district. In 1994, the then-Congress government led by Hiteswar Saikia had issued a similar eviction notice to evict encroachers from the same area.

Government records show that more than 400 Bengali-speaking Muslim families encroached land in Phuhuratoli and Dhalpur in the early 1990s. Nearly half of them were initially allotted plots by the Darrang district administration after they claimed they were flood-affected people from Kamrup, Nalbari, Barpeta, Goalpara and Dhubri districts.

The allotment order specifically mentioned that they needed to produce “eligibility certificate from the concerned Deputy Commissioner” within a stipulated time. But none of them produced any documents.

An order issued by the Revenue (Settlement) Department in May 1994, a copy of which has been accessed by this writer, had asked the then-Darrang DC, to execute eviction in Phuhuratoli Reserve on the grounds that families who were allotted land failed to “produce eligibility certificate”.

It clearly said, “Those allotments stand cancelled automatically with effect from 12-1-94 as none of the allottees could furnish eligibility certificate within a period of one year as stipulated in the order of the Deputy Commissioner, Darrang.” It is not clear whether the eviction drive was carried out or not.

Assamese Muslims demand eviction

Indigenous Assamese Muslims of Darrang district have long been highlighting the problem of encroachment in Phuhuratoli, Dholpur, Kuruwa, Kholihoi, and Baznapathar under Sipajhar revenue circle.

Eviction of illegal settlers in Darrang is one of the long pending demands of the AASU.

- Samujjal Bhattacharya, chief adviser, All Assam Students’ Union (AASU)

The encroachment of over 77,000 bighas of land in Dhalpur-Garukhuti, where violence broke out during an eviction drive on September 23, first came to light through a Right to Information (RTI) plea filed in 2013.

In 2015, an Assamese Muslim farmer (milk producer), Kobat Ali, filed a case under Assam Land Grabbing (Prohibition) Act, 2010, requesting court’s intervention to evict illegal settlers from government Village Grazing Reserve (VGR) and Professional Grazing Reserve (PGR) in the above-mentioned areas. The matter is still subjudice.

Samujjal Bhattacharya, chief adviser of the influential All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), told this writer that indigenous people in Darrang district have been fighting for their rights for many decades.

“On August 13, 2016, AASU held a Satyagraha (peaceful protest) in Sipajhar demanding eviction of illegal settlers. There have been other movements led by people as well,” he said.

Distortion of facts?

“We have now seen that attempts are being made to politicize (Hindu-Muslim issue) the whole matter. Let’s not forget that Mojamil Haque of Darrang district became a martyr during the Language Movement and the six-year-long Assam Agitation started from this same district,” Bhattacharya added.

Mojamil Haque was the “first martyr” of the AASU-led movement demanding that Assamese be used as the medium of instruction in educational institutions in the state in the early 1970s. The AASU was also at the forefront of the six-year anti-foreigner movement demanding detection and expulsion of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.

“Eviction of illegal settlers in Darrang is one of the long-pending demands of the AASU. We want the eviction to be carried out in a peaceful manner. The act of the photographer who was seen jumping near a dead body (on September 23) is barbaric and inhuman and we have condemned it,” he said.

The Assam police arrested the accused photographer, Bijoy Shankar Baniya, under IPC sections 307 (attempt to murder) and 353 (obstruction of duty). He was later sent to 14 days’ judicial custody.

A viral video showing Baniya jumping around a dead body was used by some columnists and commentators to create a perception that the eviction drive reflects “Assamese xenophobia” and the “evil social character of Assamese nationalism”.

A leading scholar in Assam said what happened in Sipajhar has been a shame but it does not reflect the overall land scenario of the state. “While condemning in the strongest of terms the manner in which the evictions were carried out through brute force of the security forces on the villagers, I would still say that this shameful incident of administrative failure and violation of human rights should not be seen as representative of the overall Assamese ethos as is being attempted by some observers,” the scholar who does not wish to be named told this writer.

Shaheen Ahmed believes there can be no solution to the contemporary problems of Assam without understanding her colonial history. “The attempts to make revisionist history or to erase the colonial past as we see in recent times, is uncalled for,” she said.