Landless indigenous people

It is sad that the Assam's BJP-led government does not have exact data about landless indigenous people in the state. This became evident when state Tribal Welfare Minister Chandan Brahma on Thursday spoke to this newspaper about land rights of the state's indigenous communities. The BJP-AGP-BPF alliance had won elections in 2016 on the sole issue of protecting 'jaati-maati-bheti' of the indigenous communities in the backdrop of large-scale encroachment of tribal belts and blocks and various categories of government land by migrants with roots in erstwhile East Bengal, erstwhile East Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh; many of these are illegal migrants. A simple reading of the political history of Assam, a three-volume publication of the state government, will reveal how the Muslim League had hatched a long-term conspiracy over a century ago to systematically encroach and occupy land in Assam to convert it into a Pakistan. While the Congress under Lokapriya Gopinath Bardoloi had successfully thwarted that conspiracy in 1947, most Congress leaders after him only worked hard to protect the immigrants. Assam has since Independence adopted four land policies – in 1958, 1968, 1972 and 1989, the fourth one when the AGP was in office; but none of these policies could protect the indigenous people's interest. The present BJP-led regime having two regional allies – AGP and BPF – adopted a new land policy in 2019. This policy, among other things spoke about removing illegal encroachment from government land, VGRs, PGRs, other reserved land, Xatra land etc. The 2019 land policy, formulated on the basis of HS Brahma Committee report, had among other issues, spoke about preference to indigenous people who had lost their land due to floods, erosion, and other natural calamities as also to those landless indigenous ST and SC families. Even in the permanent sars, the policy says land shall be given to landless indigenous people. Soon after adopting the new land policy, Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal had announced that his government would provide land to more than one lakh landless indigenous families. A few thousand people did get land pattas in the past few months. But then that is not enough to fulfil the Chief Minister's announcement made on August 15 last year. Things must move fast and in the right direction. The government is yet to fully remove the doubts and fears arising out of passing of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Same is the case with the NRC, in which several lakh names of illegal migrants have already entered. With the Sonowal government entering its election year amid the lockdown, very less time is left for the BJP-led coalition to prove that its promise of protecting the 'jaati-maati-bheti' of the indigenous people was actually genuine.