Ngamreila Haokip was despondent. On November 23, the authorities in Assam’s Kamrup district tore down her house, declaring it to be an encroachment on government land.
“We spent Rs 15 lakh to build the house,” said Ngamreila Haokip. “All our savings are gone.”
Haokip and her husband Thanglal Haokip belong to the Kuki community and are originally from Manipur, a place they left around 20 years ago to build a new life for themselves in Guwahati, which houses the capital of Assam.
For nearly two decades, they moved from one rented home to another in the city, the largest in India’s North East. In 2020, as the pandemic uprooted lives across the world, the Haokips made a new beginning: they moved into a house they thought they could finally call their own. It was located in Mairapur, a village along the Assam-Meghalaya border, roughly an hour’s drive from Guwahati.
Little of the three-room concrete structure is left now – the bulldozers reduced it to rubble.
Politics of eviction
Evictions and encroachments are often sharply political in Assam – land is closely intertwined with identity in the state. At the receiving end of most of the government’s anti-encroachment drives are Muslims of Bengali origin, often vilified as foreigners in the state.
None of the three families whose homes were demolished in Mairapur on November 23 belong to the historically persecuted community. Yet, they claim they were targeted because of their ethnicity.
“Only our Kuki people’s homes were targetted,” said Ngamreila Haokip, adding that the houses of their neighbours that also stood on government land were left alone.
A Scroll investigation into the sequence of events that led to the demolitions suggests that the ongoing ethnic conflict between the Kuki and the Meitei community in Manipur had a bearing on the events of November 23.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here .