24 September 2021: Students in New Delhi, India, protest against the government’s eviction drive, which turned violent and led to the deaths of two Muslims in the state of Assam. (Photograph by Imtiyaz Khan/ Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

On 24 September, a graphic video from India’s northeastern state of Assam surfaced on social media, showing the local police shooting a lone protester at point-blank range. Moinul Haque, a 33-year-old farmer, was filmed rushing the police officers with a stick, seemingly in anguish after his home was razed during a forced-eviction drive led by the state government in the Sipajhar region.

​​In the video, the heavily armed police, who outnumber Haque, shoot and club him with batons rather than restrain him. A photographer accompanying the police can be seen stomping on Haque’s chest as he lay dead.

Haque was a father of three and the sole caretaker of his elderly parents. He was one of two people killed by the police on 23 September, when officers violently assaulted residents who were protesting against their eviction from the Dholpur villages. The other victim was 12-year-old Shakh Farid.

The Assam government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said the expulsions in the Dholpur villages in Darrang district were to remove “illegal encroachers” and free 4 500 bighas (6km²) of state land. The authorities said about 1 200 families were evicted as part of a plan to start an “agricultural project” in the Garukhuti area. The region has been a site of conflict for decades, with some residents saying migrants usurped their land.

Nearly 5 000 people are now living in the open, most of them Bengali-speaking Muslims also known as Miya Muslims. They are largely peasants and daily-wage workers.

Undeterred by the furore over the killings, Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said he was “happy” with how the authorities had emptied the land and razed four “illegal religious structures”, including two mosques and a madrassa. He justified the police shootings by saying thousands of people had attacked the officers. Moments before violence broke out on 23 September, Darrang police chief Sushanta Biswa Sarma – the chief minister’s brother – had threatened the protesters, saying the evictions would continue “even if the world were to turn upside down”.

Widespread outrage

While the Assam government cited the agricultural project, the government continued with its “illegal encroachers” rhetoric. But most of the uprooted people say they relocated to the area about 40 years ago after losing their homes to floods in other districts. Many claim to have bought their properties from locals at the time, although most land transactions took place without proper documentation and have minimal legal standing.

The violent police response to the protest sparked widespread outrage, with the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi describing it as “state-sponsored fire”. The leader of the main opposition Congress in Assam, Bhupen Kumar Borah, called it a “barbaric act” and said the eviction was “inhuman”. Ashraful Hussain, a member of the state assembly from the All India United Democratic Front, called the police brutality “fascist, communal and bigoted” in a tweet.

Ruling BJP party spokesperson Kamakhya Prasad Tasa said opposition parties were “politicising” the issue and that the government had given notice to the settlers to clear the land, but they refused to do so. But after the nationwide fury, the state government ordered a judicial inquiry into the circumstances that led to the police violence.

The Assam chief minister visited the area in June and directed the district administration to clear the area for the government to start its community farming project. The state government began its eviction drives despite a Supreme Court of India order against the evictions because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Anti-migrant sentiment propelled the BJP’s rise to power in the state in 2016, and the government soon began a series of eviction campaigns, notably in Sipajhar. The bulk of evictions have taken place in regions where Muslims of Bengali descent are in the majority. Darrang has experienced the most evictions despite neighbouring districts having a greater number of “illegal encroachments”, according to official records.

The BJP government’s anti-migrant campaign in Assam has not only shattered families but also led to hundreds confined in detention camps, with another 1.9 million people fearing a similar fate.

Communal campaign

Over the decades, Assam has become a site for the Sangh Parivar collection of right-wing Hindu nationalist parties, including the BJP, to amplify its campaign for exclusionary citizenship based on religion. The state has been riven by ethnic strife ever since migrants arrived to work on the sprawling British tea plantations. Long-simmering tensions between indigenous Assamese people and Muslim migrants have exploded into violence. Hundreds of people were killed by mobs intent on driving away Muslim migrants during the worst flare-up in 1983.

Fear over citizenship status has thus afflicted displaced Assamese people since particularly the 1980s, when the Assam Accord was implemented and the process of identifying “illegal immigrants” began. These worries were compounded when Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC), a list of people who can prove they were already living in the state by 24 March 1971, was completed.

This story first appeared on newframe.com