It’s a little past noon and Sajid Ali, 15, should have been in school. Instead, the Class 7 student of Hazi Asmat Ali Batamari Haidubi MEM, a government school in Batadrava in Nagaon district of Assam, is cooped up in a small tent with his family of five.
“How can I go to school? I don’t have my books or my uniform. Everything got destroyed during the demolition,” he says.
Over a month after the Assam government on December 19 carried out one of its biggest eviction drives, clearing alleged encroachments on government land across four villages of Batadrava, many of the 359 affected families continue to stay in tents pitched in the area, while others have moved in with relatives elsewhere in the state.
By now, Sajid Ali and other children living in nearby tents have gathered around headmaster Diganta Bora, who has dropped by to urge the displaced families to send their children to school.
Speaking to The Indian Express, headmaster Bora says, “Around 100 students in my school are from areas affected by the eviction and they have not been attending school this past month. Today, for instance, only 172 of the total 282 students (from Classes 1 to 8) were present. We are hoping to persuade their families to send them and are assuring them that we will make arrangements for their children. We are trying to collect old books from our former students and are planning to buy some sweaters for them.”
In the space of a month, the Assam government carried out three eviction drives: a few days after Batadrava, around 40 families were evicted from Kanara Satra in Barpeta district; and on January 10, around 450 hectares of “encroached” forest land was cleared in the Pabha Reserved Forest Area in Lakhimpur, displacing around 500 Bengali-origin Muslim families. Both the Barpeta and Nagaon evictions involved satra land. Satras are influential monastic institutions created as part of the 16th century neo-Vaishnavite reformist movement started by Vaishnavite saint-reformer Srimanta Sankaradeva. The BJP government has over the years promised to free these lands of alleged “encroachment” and “land grabbing” by suspected immigrant populations in the state.
While the Opposition has protested the evictions, accusing the government of selectively targeting those from the minority community and leaving people homeless in the winter, the administration has faced little resistance from the displaced, with hundreds of police and security personnel deployed for these exercises.
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With Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma repeatedly asserting that the evacuation of government, forest and satra land will be a continuous exercise in the state, the initial protest by the residents has given way to a sense of resignation.
At Lalung Gaon village, Abdul Suban, 62, rummages through the rubble of his demolished house looking for iron scrap to sell to a dealer who sat crouched next to him with a weighing scale. Suban’s family had pitched tents in a ground with around 80 members of other families.
A few kilometres away, in Haidubi, near the Batadrava eviction site, around 20 families who say they have nowhere to go and no land of their own, stayed in tents pitched on the land of Bengali-speaking Muslim families who had offered to accommodate them.
“We are living off others. The Jamiat supplied material for the tents, we are staying on someone else’s land, we are eating food donated to us. We have not seen the sorkar (administration) in all these days,” said Mir Hussain, 32.
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The government, however, has drawn a hard line, with CM Sarma making it clear that the displaced won’t be rehabilitated.
“Giving water and other facilities to evicted people does not come under any government policy. You [Opposition MLAs] went there… you can give, that’s the work of NGOs. How can we provide water to people who violated the law? They shouldn’t have encroached in the first place,” he had said in the Assembly last month.
However, he has been stating that those who are “genuinely landless” and where “there is no doubt about them being Indian citizens”, are free to apply for Mission Basundhara, the government’s land reform and settlement scheme.
Officials in the district administration repeat the same.
“No specific decision (on rehabilitation) has been taken. The Chief Minister has already said that those who are landless can apply under the Basundhara scheme, so we can see if something works out. Otherwise, those areas were settled in a completely illegal way, so there’s no question of claiming that land,” said a senior official in the Nagaon district administration.
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Amiruddin, 28, hopes he qualifies for any government assistance that may come his way. “I am ready with all my papers: landless certificate, NRC documents. I have been giving those to whoever comes — lawyers, activists, anybody — in the hope that we can get something from the government,” he says.
On the fact that those evacuated have put up little resistance, Zunaid Khalid, Guwahati High Court advocate and general secretary of the Kamrup district Jamiat Ulama, who petitioned the court to register a suo motu PIL on the Batadrava eviction, says, “These evictions are done using paramilitary forces with days of flag marches in advance. There is fear and there is no question of people resisting the action. We also do not oppose evictions from government land; legally, we cannot oppose that. But we are asking for a more humane way in line with legal provisions of compensation to landless people.”
