Land encroachment and the dicey future of Assam

Tanuj Goswami

(tanujuri03@gmail.com)

The long-awaited eviction drive taken up by the state authorities has created a flutter, and the CM of Assam accounts for an overview about mass-scale encroachment and having cleared nearly 1.20 lakh bighas of land so far from illegal encroachers living on forest lands, VGRs, PGRs, and Khas government lands.

Even though the drive took an abnormally long time to materialize, it was a good achievement but considered just the tip of an iceberg and a distinct pointer to an evolving but dangerous situation on the cusp of spilling over to a grave situation in coming days.

The operation also reflects the sordid pasts of the earlier political regime in Assam (Congress in particular), which grievously failed to exercise the fundamental duties of protecting the lands of the state and unabashedly showed leniency to the rampant encroachment just for the greed of votes during election.

The Congress delivered a number of body blows to the indigenous people by initiating so many anti-people and evil works that Assam has had to be in the tight, inescapable grip of a strong Bangladeshi lobby that graduated to an advanced stage of usurping the state of Assam politically, economically, socially, and demographically. This vicious design is palpable everywhere in Assam, and the indigenous people are being slowly and silently incapacitated, and a serious crisis of Lebenstrum (free space) will soon create a bizarre situation that even the government of the day will be unable to control.

Assam had a very sad history of being betrayed by some people born and brought up in this very land, and their attempt to annex Assam with East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) having been foiled in the early pre-independence period, the fringe elements that worked surreptitiously to take over Assam did not neutralise, but their roots went deeper and deeper and transmuted into different hues.

The design hatched and looked after from Bangladesh worked as smoothly as they wished for due to the apathetic attitude, inefficient and corrupt administration, and very poor intelligence network of our state. The most disturbing aspect of the situation has been that a sizeable section of these ill-motivated people has sneaked into the state administrative apparatus and is capable of tilting the balance of power.

The Institute of Defence Strategy and Analysis long back brought out a report based on intelligence findings that out of the 2.66 crore population of the state of Assam as per the 1991-2001 Census, a whopping 60 lakh people had been identified as Bangladeshis.

Given the sustained influx of such persons and their abnormal birth rates, it is anybody’s guess what the growth of their population for the last 24 years could have reached by now. The flow of such undesirable people from across the border is still continuing and fanning out to all parts of Assam despite tall claims and the myth of the influx being stopped with the erection of barbed wire fencing at border areas.

Setting their sharp eyes on vacant land spaces in different areas of Assam, innumerable persons are making their own way and grabbing the precious lands wherever they can. Having settled over the land, they are used to aiming at creating social nuisance, fomenting violence, and serious law-and-order issues, forcing the locals to move out to safer areas.

All these unpleasant hard facts were simply ignored by the successive governments in Assam, whose only business was to hold power and pelf at any cost. How can a government cede its own territory to foreigners and let them be outnumbered in their own motherland? Nowhere else do such bizarre things take place so effortlessly as in this part of a strange land called Assam.

The unabashed policy of excessive political appeasement to this particular community in the name of minority has undermined the security of the entire Northeastern states. The fast-changing geopolitical scenario and evolving situation in this part of the country make this region more fragile than others in terms of security.

The free-for-all kind of land encroachment is encouraged by some local Muslim political agents who stand aligned with the designers and arrange for all sorts of government benefits & services in obtaining ration cards, voter cards, PAN cards, Aadhar cards, etc., for the encroacher.

The infiltrators working as rag-pickers, construction workers, cultivators, minions, etc., are mostly prone to crime and adept in camouflaging and immoral & illicit activities like murder, arson, rape, and kidnapping, which are quite outlandish and off-putting for the peaceful indigenous people of the state.

The complexity of the situation is ominously growing, but what is not understood is why our intelligence agencies or the Centre have been humming and hawing over an issue of deep security concern for so long.

Our national government and the deposed Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina had maintained a long cordial relationship, thrashed out several bilateral issues, and inked a number of agreements for close cooperation, but surprisingly not a single word about the festering issue of Bangladeshi infiltration and their deportation was ever mooted. Is it because the problem is Assam-specific, and does the Centre abdicate its constitutional duties to protect its own citizens at a very sensitive border area of the country?

Meanwhile, the CM of the state has boldly adopted a series of positive actions to counter all aspects of the worsening situation. But a lone person with certain limitations is not expected to undo the accumulated grievous damages and continue to take on endlessly the mighty force of immigrants. He was absolutely right in saying that it will take 25 years to clear the encroachment, but it is too long a period to save Assam from now until doomsday.

A holistic countervailing approach with assistance from intelligence agencies and even armed forces must be taken up. The government must not dither while ensuring protection and constitutional safeguards to a small subnationality of the sensitive border area of the Northeast. The situation is too grave to be pigeonholed at one’s own peril.