Eviction Is The ‘New Normal’ For Bengali Muslims In Assam: Where Do All They Go?

A very dear friend of mine was super euphoric after the news of the surgical strike came to the public domain. Borrowing a poet's word she wrote on her timeline, Aaj Brihoshpotibar, Pahar Jangal saaf karar din (today is Thursday, the day to clean the jungle of the locality). Her indication was loud and clear. She was jubilant in the success of the surgical strike that the Prime Minister claimed had cleaned the terrorists.

The indifferent mammoth bulldozer standing on the front page of a news portal with the caption, ‘Eviction drive carried out peacefully’ gives the same vibe of my over-joyous friend. The continuous eviction process going in Assam to free the government lands from the demarcated ‘encroachers’ mostly constituted of Bengali Muslims no more attract resistance or formidable challenge. As the Barpeta district administration cleared of 400 Bighas land evicting around 45 families in Baghbar Assembly Constituency on December 26 when the world was celebrating Christmas, there was nothing except silence.

According to the media reports, the sole voice that persistently opposed the move was former Congress MLA Sherman Ali Ahmed who was allegedly detained for hours during the eviction drive. The officials said that the legal procedure had been thoroughly followed as the families staying there received consecutive notices. One of the officials even told The Telegraph that one of the encroacher families had rented out 100 bighas land that they illegally got possession of.

However, Ahmed protested not specifically against the eviction, rather his focus was solely rehabilitation and restoration of the evicted people. But what will government do with the land? Ahmed said that the earlier plan was to found a dairy farm but it is seemingly impossible as the land remains under 15 feet deep water during the rainy season.

This eviction drive adds to the list of bulldozing that has frightened the Bengali Muslims of Assam. On December 19, civil authorities evicted around 302 families from a large chunk of what they call ‘unauthorised land’. As per the reports of Scroll, the authorities have evicted 4,449 families since May, 2021 when Himanta Biswa Sarma-led BJP government came to power.

The silence around eviction however can be attributed to the history of violence that has marked the fate of the protestors since BJP government first came to power in 2016. In that year only, police killed two Bengali Muslims who were protesting against an eviction drive near Kaziranga National Park. Close to our time, in September, 2021, two civilians had been killed and several got injured due to police firing at Darrang district’s Dolpur area where an eviction drive was on.

If every protest begets dead bodies to be buried in silence, ‘peace’ of the burial ground shrouds our memory. Pierre Nora in the paper Between memory and history, published in Representations, rightly shows our memories as ‘archival’. If the events are not archived, a day must come when it will be eliminated from the everyday discourse. In same way, the consecutive violence on Bengali Muslims in Assam have made it so ‘natural’ that mere eviction drives to remove the ‘encroachers’ rarely evoke public sentiments and emotions.

The authorities who only understand the language of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ land, are unable to grasp the transcendence of ‘home’. They can't see the muddy school bag which has been left behind. The red-coloured school bag was left by the people at one of the demolition sites in Assam. Does the name of the place matter anymore? When people are evicted, they take the most precious things with them. Maybe the bag doesn't belong to the list of the most precious.

The bewildered souls take what they think is more useful in their journey to nowhere. Does the state know where the evicted people go? They just vanish in the current of billion heads where the cries and wails of the weak don't reach the powerful. A dairy farm becomes more useful than a hundred dispossessed families.

The billion multitude doesn't want to know where these evicted people go. These displaced people slither in the garbage-filled, dingy, all-black, stinky, porous holes of the cities where you can hear the sounds but the sounds are stagnant like the stagnant plastic mountain that sits forever on the city's lungs but the babus wrap them in the cover of development.

Gradually these evicted people lose the remnants of all the air of the land they once had and become migrants. They lose their identity like the famous character of Syed Mujtaba Ali's story of the innocent shepherd who forgot his name and only could remember, “Maa khuh chihal a panjam hastam", meaning I am just prisoner number 45!

They are prisoners of the rules and laws. Brazen laws that don't know when the stream of a river lashes out on a shanty, people just save their breath not papers. When a mere paper line separates the neighbours who used to breathe the same air, laws call them people of two different nations. Is being paperless a crime? Does paper know the smell of a river?

The bulldozer laughs. It's unbridled now. From Uttar Pradesh to Assam, it has made a long journey. The tentacles of this machine boast of ruining, and demolishing all.

It doesn't want to know where the evicted people go! They are illegal encroachers now.

If you pass by any dirty pavement and if you see a shack there and, on the wall, a broken mirror mapping the length of the room, do pause for a moment and ask the dweller/dwellers-

Where do the evicted people go?