More than 1,100 families, most of them Bengali Muslims, have been evicted from government land in India’s Assam state over two days as authorities carried out a clearance drive across three districts, according to a report by Scroll.
On Sunday (18 October), authorities demolished the homes of more than 600 Muslim families in the Lutumari Longjap Reserve Forest in Nagaon district, a senior forest official told Scroll. It was the second day of the eviction campaign.
The administration maintains that the settlements were built on forest land.
A day earlier, officials said 547 families had been evicted under heavy security from Nagaon, Hojai and Golaghat districts. Of them, 336 families were removed in Nagaon, 152 in Hojai and 59 in Golaghat.
The latest figures bring the total number of families evicted over the two days to more than 1,100. In Lutumari, residents had lived for decades across more than 300 hectares of the reserve forest.
They dispute the authorities’ description of them as encroachers, claiming the government itself settled their community on the land.
Abdul Noor, 44, whose home was demolished on Sunday, told Scroll that the government had resettled the community in 1974. He said his landless ancestors had come from nearby Juria town and that around 300 families had received four bighas of land each.
Many residents subsequently worked as labourers for the forest department, Noor said.
He added that residents had petitioned the Gauhati High Court to challenge the eviction but had received no relief. More than 10 mosques, some over 50 years old, were also demolished, he said.
In June, the All India Union of Forest Working People urged the Assam government to halt the planned evictions. The organisation argued that residents of four villages — Kandarpa Longjap, Padumoni, Hatijur and No 9 Kheroni — had been settled under the colonial-era taungya system and should not be treated as ordinary encroachers.
Introduced by the British in the mid-19th century and later used in parts of Assam, the system allowed forest communities to grow food crops among commercially valuable trees while working for the forest department.
According to Scroll, which compiled figures from Assam’s revenue and disaster management department and district authorities, around 19,000 families, most of them Muslim, have been evicted from government land in the state during the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) 10 years in power.