By Arshad Ahmed
Dhalpur, Darrang district (Assam): “Are you asking about Farid? The boy they killed two years ago?”
Taij Uddin, a lean man in his 60s, sat on a bench along a stream called Nau Nodi or new river in Dhalpur, a vast swathe of fertile sandbar or char on the bank of the Brahmaputra in northern Assam’s Darrang district. The chars are shifting islands of fertile land shaped by the great river, whose average discharge is the fifth largest among rivers worldwide.
It was Thursday, 23 September 2021, when Sheikh Farid, described by his family as a playful boy, was more cheerful than ever, said his mother, Haseena Bano, a middle-aged woman, in evident sorrow as she recalled that day.
The reason, Bano explained, was that he had gone to the Dhalpur post office—a couple of km from his home in a village called Dhalpur 2—to pick up his new Aadhar card, which would give him a much-valued identification number in a land where identity and identification are fiercely contested issues.
Farid was unaware of the tension in the area that day. Hundreds of armed police and district officials swarmed the char to continue an eviction in Dhalpur 1 and 3 that had begun three days earlier, on orders of the government of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.
The evictions came three months after the BJP came to power. One of its election planks was to free the state’s land from “illegal encroachers”.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.