Corruption to citizenship: Himanta Biswa Sarma's eviction drive recasts poll battle in Assam

‘Juj ekhon hobo...’ (There will be a fight), Congress leader Gaurav Gogoi declared in May this year, shortly after being appointed president of the party’s Assam unit. Gogoi, the son of three-time Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, was referring to the Assembly elections scheduled for early next year. The mood in the Congress camp was upbeat, buoyed by negative publicity surrounding Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and the BJP over an alleged cattle procurement and distribution scam involving cattle from Gujarat’s Gir region that rocked state politics in May. Senior BJP leaders, including Cabinet Ministers and the party’s state unit president and Lok Sabha member Dilip Saikia, appeared visibly worried as the Opposition geared up to corner the saffron party and its allies ahead of the polls. 

So confident was the Congress that Rahul Gandhi, addressing a rally in Chaygaon near Guwahati on July 16, claimed that CM Sarma would be jailed for corruption once his party came to power in Assam next year. 

Just as the Congress was sharpening its attack on the BJP over corruption and its alleged failure to deliver, Sarma launched a massive eviction drive on June 16 in Goalpara, a district with a large Muslim population. Over 1,700 families, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims, were evicted from a wetland and a reserve forest. Within about 45 days, similar eviction drives were carried out in the Dhubri, Lakhimpur, Nalbari, and Golaghat districts, displacing over 5,000 families, all Bengali-speaking Muslims.

Sarma was unapologetic. He blatantly declared in public that his government would not evict the “indigenous population” as they are not considered as encroachers. “The eviction will be done against the suspected foreigners only,” Sarma told reporters on August 2. BJP considers the Bengali-speaking Muslims as “illegal migrants” from neighbouring Bangladesh and as a “threat” to Assam’s indigenous communities, who dominate the state politics. By repeatedly targeting the Bengali-speaking Muslims, Sarma shifted the political narrative from Congress’ pitch for a fight against corruption to a familiar BJP rallying cry: the fight against “foreigners”. It is an issue that has shaped Assam’s elections since the 1980s, if not earlier. 

The BJP and CM Sarma have claimed that most of those evicted from forests, wetlands, and other government land are “doubtful citizens”. Sarma has also alleged that many of the evicted families from North Assam’s Lakhimpur and eastern Assam’s Golaghat district already own land in their “home districts”, mainly in Barpeta, Goalpara and Dhubri in the western part of the state.

“They are spreading to central and upper Assam as part of a larger plot for demographic invasion over the indigenous communities,” he claimed. “We failed to prevent such an invasion in lower Assam; now they are trying to expand into the rest of the state,” Sarma said. He said that the BJP-led government has so far reclaimed 1.49 lakh bighas of government and forest land since it formed its first government in 2016. 

Badruddin Ajmal-led AIUDF, an opposition party that mainly represents the Muslims in Assam, however, questioned BJP, saying that the evicted persons are Indian citizens who got enrolled in the National Register of Citizens (NRC) by submitting pre-1971 documents. The NRC, an outcome of the anti-foreigners movement or Assam Agitation between 1979 and 1985, was updated with March 24, 1971, as the cut-off date, and 19.06 lakh (out of 3.29 crore) applicants were dropped from the draft list released in 2018. The cut-off date was also endorsed by the Supreme Court in October last year. 

Organisations representing the Muslims in Assam (about 35%) have also claimed that many had settled in forests and other government land after their land was eroded by the Brahmaputra. “This government is questioning the citizenship of the Muslims to win the hearts of the Hindus, who are now very unhappy over its failure to fulfil its promise about solving the long-standing foreigners problem,” a leader of the All Assam Minority Students’ Union said. 

“Many Muslims have even been declared foreigners by Foreigner Tribunals and were forcefully sent to Bangladesh ahead of elections with the same agenda,” he said. 

The Congress claims that the BJP-led government was targeting the Muslims to polarise voters and divert attention from the alleged corruption and the failures ahead of Assembly elections. “Sarma is not concerned about the people. He will soon hand over the land to Adani, Ambani and Ramdev. CM Sarma is targeting the Muslims only, but he is not responding to questions over the large quantity of land his family and his ministers have taken in the past few years,” Gogoi said recently. 

Gogoi has said that Congress is against the settlement of a single foreigner in Assam but has not made it clear whether the party supports the evicted persons or not.

BJP was quick to respond to Gogoi’s stand. “The Congress party, during its prolonged tenure in power, had transformed Assam into a fertile ground for illegal Bangladeshi migrants. Therefore, no genuine indigenous citizen of Assam can trust such a claim from a Congress leader,” BJP said in a statement.

CM Sarma on August 4 claimed that more than 29 bighas of government land were still being illegally occupied and it needs another five years to clear the land from encroachers. He also appealed to the residents not to give shelter to those evicted so far. “Our people should not give them shelter.”

Meanwhile, taking advantage of the emotions over the eviction drives, some local organisations in the Assamese-dominated Sivasagar district have asked the Bengali-speaking Muslims, particularly labourers and small traders, to quit.