Freeing encroached land

Assam Chief Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma has said that while a little over 1.5 lakh bighas  of land have been freed from illegal occupation in five years, large tracts of land across the state continue to be in the grip of encroachers, which his government would free in the next five years. This is a very strong statement from the Chief Minister, who has been literally on a mission mode to free valuable government lands from encroachment, mostly by persons of doubtful citizenship. The present BJP-led regime had come to power in 2016 on the election plank of protecting ‘jati-mati-bheti’ – the identity, land and homesteads of Assam’s indigenous communities – from the massive demographic invasion which started one hundred years ago or more. While a British policy dating back to 1905 to club Assam with Eastern Bengal had opened floodgates for land-hungry Muslim peasants of that region to arrive in the Brahmaputra and Barak Valleys in large swarms and occupy any and all kinds of land which they saw, the Saadullah government, blessed by the Muslim League in the pre-independence period, went out of its way to help them encroach on more land all over. Important to remember, one of the basic objectives of the Muslim League was to occupy Assam – a dream which has remained unfulfilled since Lachit Barphukan had crushed the Mughals in the Battle of Saraighat in 1671 – by pumping in large numbers of poor, landless East Bengali Muslim peasants and outnumbering the indigenous communities of Assam. While successive Congress governments of Gopinath Bardoloi, Bishnuram Medhi and Bimala Prasad Chaliha in the post-independence period took a strong stand against land encroachment, the later Congress governments only turned out to be protectors of the land-hungry infiltrators instead of becoming protectors of the interests of the indigenous people of Assam. While three non-Congress governments had failed to take effective measures against the massive land encroachments, it was the first BJP-led government headed by Sarbananda Sonowal which had initiated the drive to evict encroachers in 2017. That drive, one must remember, was opposed by the Congress party as well as by Akhil Gogoi, who even tried to physically obstruct the eviction drive carried out in Kaziranga National Park. Sonowal’s successor, Himanta Biswa Sarma, has done well by not only carrying forward the anti-encroachment drive but also by taking a much-required aggressive stand. It is because of this zero-tolerance attitude that the government has been able to free over 1.5 lakh bighas of land, mostly from the grip of infiltrators of East Pakistan/Bangladesh origin.