In Assam, Citizenship, Land, Identity Collide Ahead Of Polls

Malek Ali remembers how his life was erased. At 40, he had known no other home than Anandpur in Assam’s Golaghat district. He was born there and lived there all his life with his wife Nazmeena Begum and their two children, aged 12 and 10.

And then, in November 2025, his house was demolished. Soon after, his name vanished from the electoral rolls. “My name was there on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) list, and it was also there on the voters’ list until December 2025,” he says. In January, he insists, his name disappeared from the list.

No notice. No hearing. Police arrived, demanding he leave. “I was not even allowed to stay in the place where I was born,” Malek recounts. Now an imam in Palajuri, Laharighat Taluk, 250 km away, he sought restoration locally, asking, “Why are we treated this way? We are Indians too.”

He is not the only one. His haunting sentiment multiplies across lives, across districts, in a state where belonging is increasingly fraught with conditions. Multiple claims from various Muslim groups suggest that nearly several lakh Muslims in Assam are dubbed “Miya” and share this fate. ‘Miya’ is a derogatory term often used to refer to Muslims who are of Bengali origin, unlike the khilonjiya Muslims who have ethnic roots in the Assam region.

“This is my house,” says Shahbuddin Ali, his disbelief cutting through the dust as he stands among brick ruins that hold parts of his life. “I have been living here for more than 20 years. I have all the documents. We had bought the land. How can we be thrown out? How will we live?” He said, he belongs to Assam’s ethnic Muslim khilonjiya (sons of the soil) community, yet the distinction collapses under state action. His home was demolished on Saturday, March 14, 2026, a day before elections for the 126 seats in the state were announced.

Hussain Ahmed’s loss unfolds more quietly, but no less completely. At 31, he fled Bidapur to Laharighat taluk after authorities razed his travel agency and clothes shop, the economic backbone of his family, which included his parents, wife and four brothers. “We had something of our own there, and it was taken from us,” he recalls. Though his name remains on the voter list, he cannot return, while Hindu shopkeepers in the same market continue as before.

These shattering anecdotes expose Assam’s extremes: a state where belonging hinges on lists, land and labels.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has sought to distinguish ethnically native khilonjiya Muslims from Bangladeshi-origin immigrant Muslims, who form a large share of the state’s Muslim population, about 34 per cent according to the 2011 census.

Two weeks ago, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said, “Our indigenous Muslim community fully supports the BJP in Assam.” Four years earlier, the state cabinet formally recognised around 40 lakh Assamese-speaking Muslims, Goria, Moria, Jolah (tea garden workers), Desi and Syed, as “indigenous Assamese Muslims,” a sub-group of the broader Assamese community.

BJP spokesperson Ranjib Kumar Sarmah reiterates this distinction. “We have not evicted any indigenous Muslims.” Yet on the ground, the reality appears different.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) announced a special revision of electoral rolls in Assam with January 1, 2026, as the qualifying date. Under this process, existing names remain unless formally challenged. These developments are rooted in history. The 1947 Partition and Bangladesh’s 1971 birth drove migration into Assam. By the late 1970s, electoral rolls sparked a mass movement against “outsiders”, which was not initially communal.

But the communalisation of these events slowly began in the 1980s when the Sangh Parivar got involved. In 1983, former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, while campaigning in the eastern state for elections, was quoted as saying, “Foreigners have come here and the government does nothing. What if they had come into Punjab instead? People would have chopped them into pieces and thrown them away.” Soon after his speech, violence erupted in Nellie, in Assam’s Morigaon district. More than 2,000 people were killed. Almost all were Bengali Muslims. Once in New Delhi, Vajpayee condemned the Nellie massacre.

Even earlier, economic extraction had reshaped the region. British colonisers, having seized Assam in the late 18th century, stripped its forests for timber, bamboo, cane, tea and cash crops, floating resources down the Brahmaputra and eventually to Britain. The 1985 Assam Accord, signed by Rajiv Gandhi, fixed 24 March 1971 as the foreigner cut-off, one day before Pakistan’s East Pakistan crackdown triggered war, refugee influxes and eventual surrender on December 16. These dates would later become legal thresholds, but for many, they are lived as lines drawn across generations.

The National Register of Citizens was touted as the definitive exercise to identify genuine citizens based on a historical cut-off of March 1971, unlike the rest of the country, where the cut-off is 1950. Senior journalist and author Sanjoy Hazarika notes that the exercise left around 19 lakh people out of the list, but because a majority of them were Hindus and a few Muslims, there is no noise made about it now.

In November 2025, Assam revived the dormant Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, enacted in the aftermath of Partition amid fears of migration from East Pakistan. It ordered five Sonitpur “foreigners”, as determined by the Foreigners’ Tribunals, to exit India.

Even before this revival, reports had emerged of a teacher from Moriabari, Khairul Islam, being “pushed” into Bangladesh on May 27, 2025, after being picked up by state border police. He was eventually brought back in June, just in time for Eid.

Last week, the Chief Minister claimed that 12 illegal migrants were identified and “pushed back” to Bangladesh, without details about where they were apprehended or through which sector of the border they were sent.

“Co-opting the identity politics has been one of the core strategies of governance in Assam,” says Professor Akhil Ranjan Dutta, former head of the department of political science at Gauhati University. He says Hindutva co-opts ethnic identities, portraying Bengali Muslims as a threat to indigenous culture and civilisation.

Take the case of 68-year-old Sakina Begum, a khilonjiya Axomiya woman from Nalbari, whose father’s name appears in a 1965 electoral roll of Burkura village, predating the 1971 cut-off, was picked up on May 25, 2025 and pushed into Bangladesh. According to media reports, she has been in and out of prison and remains in that country.

Kamal Medhi of the BJP says what began as migration by Miya Muslims for work has now become a perceived threat to indigenous communities. “People used to come from the chars (river islands)… initially only to work,” he says, adding that while “they have the right to live and work,” they should remain within those areas. He argues that population growth and “too many children” are putting pressure on already scarce land.

Medhi, who began his political career with Raijor Dal and later moved through left-leaning Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti, the Congress and AAP, says many have settled on government land. “People support Himanta Biswa Sarma because they are taking over the land,” he adds, claiming that they now have greater political representation than indigenous communities.

Citing an example, Medhi points to his former Lok Sabha constituency, Barpeta. “Only the first three MPs, in 1952, 1957 and 1962, were from indigenous communities. After that, it was mostly Muslims,” he says. He adds that delimitation under the present CM enabled AGP’s Phani Bhusan Choudhury to win the seat.

Slamming this hatred is former Congress MP from Lakhimpur, Balin Kuli, who says that the BJP is targeting Muslims because they have no other issue to highlight. “There are no documents or surveys done to identify any of the claims by the BJP. They want to divide the society to rule,” adds Kuli.

“We have always supported the ethnic identity issue,” Sarmah says, underscoring that the government has reclaimed “1.5 lakh bigha from Miya encroachers,” and hopes to reclaim “five lakh bigha more” after the elections. He cites the 2012 Udalguri violence, blaming “Miya groups” for attacks and criticising the Congress for silence.

Newspaper accounts, however, note that then chief minister Tarun Gogoi blamed delays by the UPA government, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in deploying the Army. Within 10 days of the violence, Singh visited the affected areas and relief camps in Kokrajhar. Post-2014, Sarmah claims, “all this ended,” attributing it to political shifts. “We have no hatred against anyone,” he says. “We are only saying they should not have so many children and change the demographic. Land is finite here and we need land to live, so why should we give it to others?”

Senior advocate and independent candidate from Guwahati in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Upamanyu Hazarika, situates the issue within Assam’s complex ethnic landscape. There are around 247 tiny ethnic groups, some only 5,000 members strong. “When you are small, you have to save your culture, your language, your habits and your identity from being overwhelmed.” He cautions against viewing Assam’s tensions purely through a religious lens. “The dislike is not because someone is Muslim; it is because they are seen as migrants… becoming a majority.”

“This communalisation has harmed us,” he says, calling Sarma a “political mercenary” who recasts ethnic tensions as religious, while ignoring weak documentation, selective framing and land politics.

Retired IAS officer from Guwahati, Swapnanil Baruah, traces the deeper historical currents. Since the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826, Assam has undergone far-reaching demographic and political change. Following Burma’s defeat, the British annexed the region and governed it as an extension of Bengal, disrupting its distinct socio-political identity. Under the Ahom dynasty (1228-1826), Assam had developed a system integrating hill and plain societies.

Colonial rule reclassified society into “hill” and “plain”, “tribal” and “non-tribal”, “indigenous” and “immigrant”. The discovery of indigenous tea plants transformed the economy, and labour was brought from central India, reshaping demographics and creating marginalised tea garden communities.

Baruah argues that these historical processes continue to shape contemporary politics, where the strategy now centres on consolidation, “bringing Hindu groups together to retain control over indigenous interests in the face of migrant populations”.

There is also trouble brewing between Tai Ahoms, tea tribes, Moran, Motok, Chutia and Koch-Rajbongshi, who are demanding Scheduled Tribe status and the 14 communities, including Boro, Kachari, Deori, Rabha, Mech, Chakma, Dimasa, Garo and a few others, who have already been recognised as ST.

Talking about land tensions between the government and the Rabha tribes near Guwahati, a member of the Rabha National Council from Barduar Bagan in the Kamrup district, at the foothills of the Assam-Meghalaya border, Pakhiraj Rabha, said, “Government is trying to take our land and build a satellite township. They announced it in Palasbari, in Kamrup district, in May 2025, and one tender has already been launched. Now they are trying to turn it into an urban development centre.” He added that a proposal has also been notified for a multipurpose power project on 1.96 lakh bighas of land. “This will take all our land,” he said, adding that they have planned a protest against the project at Ukiam on March 27.

These tensions are most visible in eviction drives, officially framed as removing encroachments from government or forest land. Yet, as Baruah notes, “concerns remain about unequal impact and the lack of clarity in rehabilitation”.

“Despite this, the current leadership continues to enjoy electoral support, bolstered by a weak opposition, infrastructure improvements and perceptions of greater transparency in public recruitment. The tea industry, central to Assam’s economy, is still widely seen as benefiting outsiders more than local communities,” adds Baruah.

Former Assam special DGP Pallab Bhattacharya notes that evictions have disproportionately affected Bengali-speaking, largely Muslim cultivators on “government” land and chars, who have often lived and farmed there for decades, sometimes with old revenue papers. Rights groups and local leaders argue that, instead of a neutral, statewide survey, eviction has been concentrated in Muslim-dominated pockets, making it appear “selective” rather than rule-based.

This generates fear and grievance in one community, and resentment or hardened sentiment in others, creating conditions for communal polarisation. India’s constitutional framework, Bhattacharya notes, forbids discrimination on grounds of religion under Articles 14 and 15, while Article 21 protects life and dignity regardless of faith.

Such measures may yield short-term electoral gains, but they risk corroding the legitimacy of the state, making it appear less a neutral arbiter and more an instrument of one community against another. “For a historically diverse Assam, where immigrant Muslims once chose an Assamese identity, as seen during the Assam agitation, rather than aligning with Pakistan or Bangladesh, such a trajectory is particularly self-defeating,” adds Bhattacharya.

The state of limbo faced by Malek, Shahbuddin and Hussain embodies Assam’s problem: social boycotts, expulsions, razed lives and identity crises, where citizens hope for inclusion.

Ashlin Mathew is senior associate editor, Outlook. She is based in Delhi

This article appeared in Outlook's April 1st, 2026 issue titled ParaDime Shift, which looks at how the US-Israel attack on Iran has come home to India with the LPG crisis and is disrupting India’s energy ecosystem, exposing policy gaps, and testing the limits of its diplomacy.