The No-Go Zones of Assam

KAIM BHASHANI IS A VILLAGE whose name spells out a story in itself. Located on a char (riverine island) on the Brahmaputra not far from Dhubri town, the village is home to the deshi Muslim community that traces its origin to the Koch Adivasis who have for long lived along the banks of the river in Bengal and Assam. Today, however, the deshis are turning into strangers in their own lands. In Kaim Bhashani, the once numerically dominant deshis are steadily losing ground to illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

“We don’t know from where they came, but over the past decades their numbers here have become overwhelming,” says Nur Islam, 50, a longtime resident of the char. Islam and the headman of Kaim Bhashani, Abdul Kalam Azad, point to an edge of the char where deshi villagers once held lands and a settlement of about 11 families lived and farmed. Last year, in October, the settlement was burnt down and the families were attacked with sharp weapons. Since then, that part of the village has become a ‘no-go’ zone fully occupied by illegal immigrants.

“Our land, like any other char, is fertile. Once the waters [of the river] recede, the land is ready for cultivation. No fertilisers are required. But now, many families have lost their land to the miyas [an expression for Bengali Muslims],” says Islam.

The area has a long history of illegal migration but one that is now beyond a tipping point as the very survival of the community is at stake.

At one time, before Independence, Kaim Bhashani was in the thrall of East Bengali leader Maulana Bhashani. “Our leader, Ghiyasuddin Ahmed, who was a member of the state Assembly in the first elections in 1937, invited Maulana Bhashani, believing him to be a co-religionist and one who would guide us,” says Islam. But the ‘Red Maulana’—Bhashani was a Deoband-trained cleric who was also a populist—had a different goal. According to Islam and other elder residents, he wanted to settle as many people from Bengal as possible. While Bhashani was driven away—the village and the area turned pro-Congress overnight in the 1940s—the flow of illegal immigrants has continued unabated since.

“We grew up with the Bhatias [Bengali-origin Muslims] but now they want our land. When we try to assert our identity, our language and our mores, they turn to social media against us, saying we display ‘un-Islamic’ tendencies,” says Hafizur (name changed), a college graduate who works in the area.

According to Hafizur, the miyas are well-organised and have money and a network that helps them. “Our ancestors were Koch people who lived freely in this land. They never thought about getting papers for the land and said there was no need as the land belonged to us. Now we are paying the price for that ignorance,” he says. Efforts to reclaim the land in local courts in Dhubri have foundered due to the lack of money, absence of proper legal aid and simply, the far better organised efforts of the miyas.

Some 250 km away, on the southern bank of the Brahmaputra, Nizam Ali tells a similar story. The oldest land title record that Nizam Ali has dates to 1958. But that is just a piece of paper. His ancestors had been working in Buniyapara village near the southern bank of the Brahmaputra since the 18th century. Buniyapara lies in Chaygaon sub-division of Kamrup district and has for long been subjected to riverine erosion. But the process is uneven and there are years when the level of the river eats up the land. Then, suddenly, land reappears after many years. But in Ali’s case, it is not the river that ate up the land but illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

“Sometime in 1981, the river began to erode our land and a decade later we had to leave the place as there was water all around,” he tells Open at the edge of Buniyapara village. Those were difficult years for this village of Assamese people. There were around 300 families, of which 200 were ethnic Assamese Muslims and the remaining were Hindus. For the next six to seven years, Ali and his neighbours led a vagabond existence. They worked as labourers to make ends meet. When someone allowed them to farm on patches of land, they grew crops.

In 2000-01, the river changed its course and the sunk land re-emerged. But by the time the villagers returned, almost every bit of the land had been taken over by illegal immigrants.

“The revenue authorities came to our help. The sub-divisional officer came here and marked out our land with pegs and ropes. But as soon as he left, they [the migrants] came here in large numbers and uprooted everything. We had to run,” Ali says as he looks forlornly at his land in Buniyapara. Today, he cultivates around 18 bighas of the grazing reserve land that belongs to the state government. His original 55 bighas have been taken over by illegal immigrants.

Ali’s tragedy is that he continues to pay land revenue for the land that belonged to him. The latest receipt dates to mid-November this year.

“It is the hope that one day the government will help us recover our land that keeps me alive. All my neighbours have been driven away by these [illegal immigrants] people. Far from recovering our land, it is dangerous for us to even go near it,” he adds. Two of Ali’s neighbours, Amal Das and Shambhuru Das—who travel daily from Chaygaon to till their plots on the grazing reserve—have similar stories to share. Amal Das lost 300 bighas of land and Shambhuru Das 25-30 bighas. Their patches are located in different places but, whenever possible, the three former neighbours try to remain together for Buniyapara is not a friendly place.

WHEN CAMERAS TURNED on an eviction drive in a nondescript town on the northern bank of the Brahmaputra in late September, the worst fears of right-thinking people in India seemed to have been confirmed. Assam Police, allegedly at the behest of the political establishment in Guwahati, had brutally evicted Muslim residents of the area who had been living there peacefully.

The trouble with that story, as with all such stories that generalise from singular events, is that it conveys a partial truth or, as in the case of Assam, it is misleading.

When in Assam, one often hears the claim that the state resembles a tinderbox. For an outsider, it is hard to discern the meaning of the expression ‘tinderbox’, let alone unpack it. One answer, popular in Delhi, is that the tinderbox feeling has everything to do with the failure of secularism in Assam and the active furthering of communalism there. In Dhing town of Nagaon district, one of the many small urban settlements that dot Assam’s landscape, the meaning—and the explanation—of what is a tinderbox is very different.

Much like other parts of the state, there has been steady encroachment of land by illegal immigrants. “The char land is totally in their hands,” says a person closely involved in Dhing’s local politics. The person runs a business establishment near the T-point on the road from Nagaon in Dhing. What rankles him and others the most is that land belonging to sattras—Vaishnavite monasteries—has been taken away. “You name it, be it the Rampur sattra, or the one at Norua, Bordowa or at Patekibori, their lands have been taken away.” Accurate estimates of how much land has been grabbed are hard to come by, but for virtually all the key sattras substantial portions of land are not in their control.

In addition to encroachments on river banks, outsiders have bought land by legal means. Ordinarily, this would not be an issue as thousands of land transactions take place every day. But in Dhing and its adjoining areas, this has led to an enclave mentality among the communities. In the town proper, it is business as usual but farmland and residential areas of the two communities are distinct and segregated. The net result is not just segregation by choice but the turning of these land parcels into ‘no-go’ zones for each other.

“It is like living in a cage,” he says, adding that over the years, of the 182 Marwari families in Dhing only about 10 are left. “The trend is clear. The younger generations of Hindu families just leave and never come back, leaving the population even more skewed.” The massive demographic change and the steady change in the ownership of land have hardened political attitudes among Hindus in Dhing. The refrain is that whether or not the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) bestows any benefits, it should stay in power.

The Patekibori sattra holds a special place in Vaishnavite Hinduism that prevails in Assam. The site is closely associated with the life of Srimanta Sankardeva, the founder of this variant of Hinduism. It is believed that he was born here. But that is disputed and it is also claimed that he was born at Bordowa, not far from Patekibori. But whatever the claims and counter-claims, it is a place closely associated with Hinduism in Assam. However, if you try to locate the place from Moirabari, the village on whose edge it is located, chances are you will find it hard to get there. To put it mildly, Patekibori and Moirabari are cosmologically different worlds.

Tucked at the end of a narrow road with leafy trees on both sides, the sattra is quiet and does not get many visitors except on days of cultural significance. The caretaker says much of the land attached to the sattra, something that enabled its independent existence, has been lost to encroachments. When asked what his establishment was doing to recover the land, he is queasy. “We have good relations with people around us. They [the encroachers] have promised to return the land to us.” His reticence in explaining what is going on is understandable. He does not want to offend the members of a dominant community.

As the sun sets on Patekibori, the sattra grows even quieter as azan for the maghrib prayer rends the air from multiple directions. It is a sign of the times. The sattras will not disappear or be harmed in any way; they will just fade away.

The steady takeover of lands from the edge of Dhubri district to beyond Middle Assam has been going on for a long time even if the mechanisms have varied from outright encroachments to legal methods to purchase land. It is not as if the people of Assam did not know what was going on. The situation seen in Dhing today—encroachments, ‘no-go’ zones and fear for personal security—was prophetically described 90 years ago by Ambikagiri Raichoudhury, the foremost Assamese public intellectual of his time. Writing in the fifth edition of Chetana, the magazine he edited, Raichoudhury noted: “For some years, the migrants of a lower class from Mymensingh district, who have settled in Goalpara, Kamrup, Darrang and Nagaon, have been committing atrocities on women. We keep on hearing this and the places where these immigrants have settled down, women cannot go there alone.” He added: “[T]here is no consciousness among the Ahoms of the dangers that they face.”

If Raichoudhury were alive today, it is certain his writing would be dubbed tendentious and he would be called ‘communal’. But what he wrote had more than an element of truth in it. Yet, 90 years ago, he could not have foreseen another problem: the wholly ideological lens through which Assam’s problems are viewed in rarefied circles in Delhi. At first there was, for long, the outright denial that there were illegal immigrants. When the fact became undeniable, the extent of the problem was declared minimal. Finally, when the controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC) process resulted in a botched count, one could go back to first base and say there are hardly any illegal immigrants in the state. All this can be topped up by saying that the Assamese are, fundamentally, chauvinist and cannot live peacefully with other communities. Of late, they have also turned communal.

The ground reality, in the three different regions of the state Open visited, is quite similar. In each area, ethnic Assamese—irrespective of religion—are the real victims of steady eviction from their land. Even here, there is a ‘Delhi explanation’ at hand: the steady disappearance of land is due to erosion by the Brahmaputra and the resultant land pressure. But as the situations in Kaim Bhashani and Buniyapara show, land may be swallowed up by the river but it is encroached on by illegal immigrants.

Contrary to the uproar in Delhi’s ‘secular circles’ that Muslims, especially Bengali Muslims, are about to be evicted from their homes in Assam, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma admits great difficulties in removing already existing squatters in different parts of the state (see interview). All he can do is prevent further encroachments. But facts are never an impediment to ideological arguments. Assam is the exemplar of that reality.

AssamBangladeshethnic minorityillegal immigrantsMuslims