On September 12, Assam Police shot 19-year-old Haidar Ali dead in Assam’s Kamrup Metropolitan district because they claimed he had been part of a violent demonstration against an eviction drive. His family contended that Ali had no reason to protest the operation: their home was not among the hundreds of structures demolished because the authorities alleged they were unauthorised. On Wednesday, nonetheless, the Assam government’s bulldozers returned to destroy the family’s home.
The demolitions and shootings of Ali and another teenager in Kachutali village highlight the cruelty that characterises how the Assamese state treats its Bengali-origin Muslim residents.
As my colleague Rokibuz Zaman has reported, when the authorities demolished Muslim homes on September 9, three days before the two men was killed, there was no resistance. However, the authorities soon went back to the village, angered that the evicted families had left their possessions with their neighbours or on vacated land. Not only did the government want to demolish their homes, it wanted to banish these working-class people from the area.
This second action resulted in resistance from residents. The police opened fire, to deadly effect.
Outsider status
By now, such viciousness has become a regular feature in Assam. Government authorities move frequently to evict Bengali-origin Muslims from plots on which they are said to have occupied illegally – other communities rarely face such action. And when it comes to Bengali-origin Muslims, the police are trigger happy, opening fire to kill in a manner that would be unthinkable for another community in Assam.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.