NORTH LAKHIMPUR (The Thursday Times) — Authorities in India’s north-eastern state of Assam have bulldozed about 135 homes and a mosque on government grazing land in Lakhimpur district, among them the homes of Bengali Muslim families whom the state itself settled there after they were driven from their village in the 1983 violence.
The eviction drive at the Bogeenadi Professional Grazing Reserve, in the Kadam revenue circle, began on Friday morning under a heavy police guard. District administration sources said about 320 hectares of government land had been cleared, and that eviction notices had been served before the operation, after which several families took down their own houses.
Residents said 25 families had lived in permanent structures in the area for more than four decades. They were displaced from Bhimpora village in the Bodhakora area during the violence of 1983, at the height of the Assam Movement, sheltered at a police station and a weekly market, and then given land at Bogeenadi by the district administration, which issued them identity cards on June 17, 1983. Government records call the settlement Refugee Camp, Muslim Camp, and Miyan Camp, and it has a primary school, a childcare centre, piped water, and electricity connections.
“We were settled at Bhimpora village in the Bodhakora area of Lakhimpur district when mobs supporting the Assam Movement attacked us and ransacked our village in 1983,” said 73-year-old Manik Ali, a local member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who was among those evicted. His son is vice-president of the BJP’s minority wing in the district. “Yet, I am now being evicted by the same government,” he said.
Claims of selective targeting
The mosque stood on land that, according to documents cited by residents, was allotted in 1992 for a mosque and a cemetery for the area’s Muslims.
Residents accused the authorities of singling out Muslim households, saying homes on adjoining parts of the reserve occupied by other communities were left untouched. “Assamese communities, Misings and others are also living on PGR land. Why have only Miyans been served eviction notices?” one elderly woman asked. Azizur Rahman, a leader of the Raijor Dal party, called the demolitions “a clear-cut violation of Article 14 of the Constitution”, which guarantees equality before the law.
Several women at the site said they would not leave, and some told officials to kill them rather than demolish their homes. The families have asked the state government to give them alternative land.
A wider campaign
The state government says it has a zero-tolerance approach to encroachment on government land. The Lakhimpur administration has served notices on about 450 families across grazing reserves in the district and planned to move on to Koylamari and Borbil on Saturday.
The drive is the latest in a series across Assam. More than 1,100 families, most of them Muslim, were evicted in Nagaon, Hojai, and Golaghat districts in a two-day operation in October, and hundreds more lost their homes in Dhubri district on November 1. After an earlier drive, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma wrote on X: “More to come. We will not stop till every inch of our land is reclaimed.”
On Thursday, the Gauhati High Court ordered the state to rehabilitate and compensate families displaced by earlier eviction drives in three districts.
