Guwahati: The growing pace of evictions of cultivating communities from their lands in Assam has been making news across the country. In an atmosphere of the heavy-handedness of the state, immense repression, and fear, news reports have noted the lack of resistance to this process. The constant communal polarisation in the state reinforces a narrative of ‘outsider versus insider’, or ‘legal versus illegal encroachers’, using Gobblesian tools. In these times, the coming together of displaced people from across Assam cutting across the narrow margins of communal and ethnic divides comes as a ray of hope for the battered and bruised communities.
The state has not witnessed the coming together of poor and marginalised farming communities for some time, and this trend was broken on February 25, when in a remarkable show of strength, more than a thousand people from across the state gathered in Sasal, Guwahati, to protest this growing and widespread phenomenon. The message at the demonstration was clear: solidarity and unity cutting across communities against a state that has deployed highly divisive and repressive means to hasten the pace of land grab.
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Communities from Mikir Bamuni Grant, Dholpur, Doloo Tea Estate, Baghbor, Batadrava, Kaziranga, Salna, Kondoli, Lakhimpur, and Rani, along with civil society organisations and trade unions, came together to raise their collective voice against the systematic dispossession of working people from their lands. Karbis, Adivasis, Bengali Muslims and Hindus, Misings, Tiwas, Assamese and other communities spoke in one voice – against the state’s communal agenda and for people’s right to land and a dignified livelihood.
Protest in Guwahati’s Sasal by Assam’s poor and Adivasis against the alleged forceful takeover of lands by the Assam government on February 25, 2023. Photo: Special arrangement.
Testimony after testimony from displaced and affected communities pointed to the blatant violation of people’s rights, and a state that was willing to strip its own people of their meagre resources for survival in order to hand over their lands to corporates, industrialists and the mining lobby. While the government’s continuing arrogance was displayed in sending a police officer to receive the memorandum in place of a civil administration official, it will have to reckon with a people who are seeing through the communal politics being furthered by the state to legitimise the rapid pace of evictions of Bengali Muslims in particular, something that has sharply increased over the last few months.
Assam government’s ‘double game’
The issues of land loss due to river erosion and rehabilitation of displaced communities have never been addressed by the government. According to the Government of Assam’s own report, “bank erosion by the rivers has been a serious issue since last six decades as more than 4.27 Lakh Hectares of land was already eroded away by the river Brahmaputra and its tributaries since 1950, which is 7.40% of the area of the state”. Millions of families have lost their land to erosion. Though there is a provision for the rehabilitation of the people affected by floods or land loss due to erosion, the government has not taken any concrete steps to address the issue.
The result has been that millions of homeless people have moved around the state in search of lands. Several of them were ‘settled’ by the government with promises of receiving land titles in the future. However, these promises were never met such that many are being evicted from those very lands today under the pretext of being ‘illegal encroachers’, playing into the chauvinistic popular imagination of the legal versus illegal citizen.
Further, the land regime and the revenue system in Assam still follow the colonial legacy and even the maps and land status that they use today are inherited from colonial documentation and archaic settlement operations carried out decades ago; this in itself has missed out on the fluvial and fluid nature of land and settlement in the flood-prone and disaster risk region of Assam.
The protest demonstration vehemently opposed the polarising tactic of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and spoke out loud and clear that this was simply a measure to clear the land for big profit-mongering projects, all in the name of ‘development’.
Ajit Kumar Bhuyan, a member of the Rajya Sabha, derided the “land-hungry nature” of the present ruling dispensation, including the personal accumulation of wealth and property by the chief minister’s family. Renowned senior advocate of the Guwahati high court, Santanu Borthakur, pointed to the colonial character of the land laws that govern land tenure regimes in the state and an urgent need for reform in these laws.
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Several intellectuals and activists across the state joined in to extend their solidarity with the protesting farmers to emphasise the need to come together beyond the divisions through which the state seeks to separate people and challenge the neoliberal state’s capital-friendly attack on people’s land and resources.
Protest in Guwahati’s Sasal by Assam’s poor and adivasis against alleged forceful takeover of lands by the Assam government on February 25, 2023. Photo: Special arrangement.
The latest spate of evictions – Barbhag in Barpeta district and Batadrava in Nagaon district in December 2022, Pava Reserve Forest in Lakhimpur district in January 2023, and Burha Chapori Wildlife Sanctuary in Sonitpur district in February 2023 – all have in common the predominant presence of Bengali Muslims amongst those evicted and legitimised by emphasising the ‘illegal’ nature of the land occupation.
Concerns over Mission Basundhara 2.0
These evictions come in the midst of the Assam government’s implementation of the second phase of its much-touted land digitisation and regularisation scheme Mission Basundhara 2.0. The second phase introduced in November 2022 claims to precisely regularise people’s land rights under the ironic slogan ‘Mur Maati, Mur Adhikar‘ (My Land, My Right). The scheme includes settling land rights of landless households living and/or cultivating on government land, village grazing reserves, and granting ownership rights to occupancy tenants, amongst other things.
Police attempt to disperse the people protesting against an eviction drive in Darrang district of Assam police, September 23, 2021. Photo: PTI Photo
However, the state’s high-handedness in evicting communally-targeted communities at just the time it claims to be working towards instating land rights in the hands of cultivating communities is a tell-tale sign of who it imagines as beneficiaries of the scheme – the elusive and unconstitutional category of the ‘indigenous’ people of Assam.
Further, there are multiple and serious concerns being raised on the claims and intent of Mission Basundhara 2.0. People are fearful of losing their cultivable land as in the case of VGRs and PGRs where, as per the scheme, only 1 bigha for homestead land is being allotted. The remaining land is then to be taken by the government.
This very limited understanding of giving ‘land rights’ to the people appears only as a mechanism to bypass the law relating to land acquisition and directly dispossessing people from their lands, which have been historically used by communities for different purposes. While the government carries out this apparent land settlement mechanism online, farmers and communities have been demanding a fresh settlement process respecting the laws of the land and the communities that have been residing in those for generations.
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The very ‘indigenous’ people who are meant to benefit from this scheme came together on February 25 with Bengalis, Hindus and Muslims, to highlight the nefarious ways in which the state has gone about depriving not only Bengali Muslim peasants but all working peoples, particularly from socially and economically backward communities, of their lands and livelihood.
Karbi and Adivasi peasants from Mikir Bamuni Grant have lost their lands through the deliberate violation of the Assam (Temporarily Settled Areas) Tenancy Act 1971 and the Assam Fixation of Ceiling on Land Holdings Act 1956 to a 15 MW solar power plant set up by Azure Power Forty Pvt. Ltd. under Assam government’s PPP model to generate solar power as per its policy framework.
The neoliberal PPP model allows private firms such as Azure Power to acquire land outside of the established framework of the new Land Acquisition Act 2013 that put in place certain safeguards and procedures for the acquisition of land for development projects, as well as for ensuring measures for gaining the consent of local communities.
The forceful takeover of land of the cultivating communities of Mikir Bamuni was made possible by the feudal power of upper caste landlords with historically close connections to state institutions on the one hand, and neoliberal corporate capital on the other, rendering the indigenous peasants into ‘mobs’, ‘interested parties’ and even ‘outsiders’ whose legal claim to the lands they cultivated were simply negated despite possessing the documents.
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Loss of livelihoods
In Doloo Tea Estate near Silchar in Assam’s Barak Valley, the Lalbagh division of the plantation was acquired by the government, allegedly for building a greenfield airport that was mired in controversy. As a result, nearly 2,000 families of Adivasi tea garden workers found their principal source of livelihood threatened.
Police deployed in Silchar’s Doloo Tea Estate, Assam, on May 11 to clear land for a greenfield airport. Photo: Special arrangement.
In a closed-door agreement with a few trade union representatives, ‘compensation’ took the form of back wages and entitlements that were owed to the workers in any case, an agreement that was rejected by the majority of the workers who stood to lose their jobs as a result. With no prior information, workers received a rude shock when they witnessed over a hundred bulldozers descend on the plantation in May 2022 to uproot the tea bushes and clear the land before any agreement could be reached with the workers. While the plantation management agreed to employ these workers in other parts of the plantation, work conditions have since worsened and surveillance and control of their movement have increased.
Institutionalisation of land grab
The idea of increasing forest cover by evicting people has taken deep roots in Assam. The speakers from Kaziranga, Salna, mostly from the Adivasi, Mising and Karbi and Bengali-speaking Muslim communities also spoke of their land being taken away by the forest department with the use of violent brutal force without any form of redressal. The constant expansion of the forest without taking into consideration the pledges of respecting indigenous and community rights of people has become the norm.
The evictions in Laokhowa Burhachapori are the most recent where the people and property have been bulldozed without any respite. In Kaziranga, various communities including Misings, Adivasis, Karbis, Bengali Hindus and Muslims, Nepalis, Biharis and Assamese have been displaced from their lands with the expansion of the National Park and Tiger Reserve. With 11 additions to the territory of the protected area, each addition has rendered local communities living around the park into ‘illegal encroachers’.
While the state harps on about giving land rights to the ‘indigenous’ people of Assam, pitting farmers of Bengali origin against them, the demonstration challenged this divisive agenda that is nothing but a smokescreen to clear up land for land banks in order to attract investments in the state. Systemisation of property rights is an old World Bank neoliberal agenda that insists on clearly spelt out exclusive private property rights in land so as to facilitate easy transfer and acquisition of land. Mission Basundhara 2.0 seeks to do just that – settle the complex, competing and historically unsettled claims over land across the state so as to free up all lands over which claims cannot be made, either due to ‘eligibility’ conditions, or lack of documents, rendering the large majority ineligible.
These lands may then be aggregated into land banks, or otherwise easily allocated to industrial projects as per the state’s industrial policy of 2019. While the state has attempted to disenfranchise Bengali Muslims of their right to land using labels such as “illegal encroachers”, with its underlying implicit indication towards the figure of the ‘Bangladeshi’, the demonstrators came together to reject such labels and instead asserted their unity as farmers and cultivators.
There are lands being granted to Patanjali, Adani, Azure Power, etc. Oil wells are being granted inside National Parks, private resorts and five-star hotels are being granted agricultural and forest lands, tea gardens are being sold to private entities at throwaway prices and ceiling surplus land is being handed over to power companies. These issues were all strongly raised by the demonstration that opposed the selling of public resources to private entities without any accountability or long-term benefit to the people of Assam.
Vasundhara Jairath is an Assistant Professor in Development Studies at IIT Guwahati. Pranab Doley is an Assam-based political activist.