BRAHMA PANEL REVELATIONS ON LAND GRAB
BY OUR STAFF REPORTER
Guwahati, July 30: The Committee for Protection of Land Rights of Indigenous People of Assam, led by former Chief Election Commissioner Hari Sankar Brahma, has claimed that ubated influx of illegal Bangladeshi tiols into Assam is not a new phenomenon but going on since the pre-independence era.
To buttress the claim, the Brahma Committee in its interim report submitted to the Assam government last week has mentioned that Sir Sayed Mohd Sadullah of the Muslim League who had formed five governments in between 1937 and 1946, launched a scheme designed as ‘Grow More Food’ campaign. On the pretext of this scheme, Sadullah brought in lakhs of Bengali Muslim peasants from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and settled them in Assam by giving liberal grants of land in forest reserves, VGRs and PGRs etc. Besides settling the Muslim peasants by the Sadullah government, vast stretches of char lands and government waste/khas land in lower Assam districts and tribal areas came under encroachment of Muslim peasants.
Such development according to the Brahma Committee had prompted the then Viceroy General of India Lord Wavell to remark that the Muslim leaders on the pretext of “Grow More Food” were actually interested to “Grow More Muslims” in the State. Besides such mindset of Muslim leaders, the open India- East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) border facilitated planned immigration of Bengali Muslims to Assam.
The Brahma Committee constituted by the Assam government in February this year to suggest ways to protect the land rights of indigenous people, while drawing a conclusion from reports and observations made by different individuals and institutions including the Supreme Court on the issue of illegal infiltration, said that “these land hungry illegal Bangladeshis, like swarms of ants flock and spread into any vacant government land, work on them like vultures do on the corpse. They encroach upon all classes of land — hills or beels, reserved forests or roadside reserved lands, xatras or tribal belt/block lands.”
In recent months, according to the Brahma panel, gangs of illegal Bangladeshis armed with lethal weapons have attacked indigenous/Assamese villagers in Sipajhar, Mukalmua/Hajo areas, particularly in the vast spreads of char lands — either by displacing the indigenous farm owners or by grabbing the new/vacant chars.
The Brahma Committee has observed that there has been a tendency on the part of indigenous people, in particular, tribal people to sell out their patta land which paves the way for them to become landless class of people. It is not unlikely that some such people subsequently resort to encroach upon vacant government land including those along the Assam-Meghalaya border. Moreover there have been instances where indigenous people have started shifting their interests from agriculture to non-agriculture based activities which have also been contributing towards transfer of agricultural land to non-agricultural class of people.
The Brahma Committee has also asked the State government to constitute a Special Task Force to clear all the State’s encroached land from the clutches of illegal Bangladeshi migrants as well as local land grabbers within a specific deadline.