Extended Evictions

The eviction of poachers who had illegally encroached on the Kaziranga tiol Park (KNP) and its surrounding areas had raised many hackles quite unnecessarily. Such mindless opposition to the clearing of encroachment on government land is irratiol and motivated, mainly because it stems from a mind-set that tends to regard all government property as freehold land for those without land. Even if such a stand is defended on the sophistry that it is the duty of the government to provide land to every landless individual, almost everyone will agree that the tiol parks and game sanctuaries of the country ought to be protected and kept encroachment-free by the government. tiol parks that are inhabited by hundreds of encroachers can hardly be called tiol parks any more. So it was heartening to learn that even the Mas tiol Park of Baksa district was subjected to an eviction drive on Thursday resulting in the clearing of 16,000 hectares of land from the tiol park. According to the Field Director of the Mas tiol Park, Hirendra Kumar Sarma, the eviction drive went off smoothly as the encroachers had been served notices in advance and because there was no resistance from them as a consequence. One can think of two valid reasons for such lack of resistance from the encroachers. The first is that encroachers were fully aware of the success of the eviction carried out at Kaziranga and knew that such encroachment of tiol parks could not be defended on any ground and did not elicit any public sympathy. The lack of public sympathy can be attributed largely to the second reason: that the encroachers were all foreign tiols—mostly Bangladeshis. In evicting such encroachers, the government was only doing something that should have been accomplished many years ago.