Land For The ‘Indigenous’

A new land policy for Assam has been a long time coming, so the State Cabinet’s green light recently to ‘Assam Land Policy — 2019’ has certainly not come a day too soon. Drawn up to replace the State land policy of 1989, the new policy comes with an important ‘to do’ list. It defines rural areas to be situated 15 kms away from Guwahati municipal corporation limits, 5 kms from other cities and 3 kms from small towns; it adopts the principle of ‘one person one Patta’ while abolishing the practice of granting land pattas valid for 1 year; it proposes to make operations of the sub-registrar’s office and circle officer’s office fully online. Landless people within Guwahati city who have been residents prior to the cut-off date of 28 June, 2001 will be provided with plots measuring 1 katha 5 lechas. In rural areas, 3 bighas of arable land will be provided to ‘indigenous’ landless farmers, apart from half a bigha land to construct their dwelling. They will get permanent pattas after 3 years; the policy forbids them to sell such land before 15 years. However, people residing in hilly areas and earth-filled water bodies will not get pattas. It has been proposed to allot 30 bighas land to cooperative farming units and 35 bighas to those composed of female members. Deputy commissioners have been vested with authority by law to remove encroachments from lands belonging to xatras or in heritage areas. The State government has reportedly set a target of granting permanent pattas to 1,00,000 indigenous landless people by March next year; of these targeted beneficiaries whose names have already been listed, 44,000 will get pattas by November this year. Overall, the thrust of the new policy in guaranteeing land for landless sons of the soil, and simultaneously, in making the operations of the notoriously corrupt land revenue department clean and transparent — would surely be welcomed if it actually materializes. Both are big ifs though. There are serious public misgivings about whether the government is at all clear as to what is meant by the term ‘indigenous’. It is the misfortune of Assam that previous attempts to define this basic term got hopelessly bogged down in vote-bank politics. Such has been the determination of the Bangladeshi immigrant lobby and the political parties dependent on its votes, that talking about who is indigenous is to risk getting shouted down and roundly abused. Former Assam Assembly Speaker Pranab Kumar Gogoi suffered this treatment when he set out to define the term ‘Assamese people’. Mischievous quarters then sought to pit Assam Sahitya Sabha against other indigenous literary bodies over this question. Thankfully, a general consensus has since emerged that the term ‘Assamese’ as mentioned in Clause 6 of Assam Accord should read ‘Indigenous’, and this is the position the Assam government has adopted. The new land policy is also learnt to have incorporated a slew of recommendations by the Hari Shankar Brahma-led committee for protection of land rights of the indigenous people of Assam, which had rejected the 1951 NRC definition of indigenous people while putting forward its own stricter criteria. Presently, the high power committee constituted by the Central government on how to implement constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards promised under Clause 6 is gathering feedback from stakeholders. The impression gaining ground is that people deserving of such protection should include indigenous tribal, indigenous Assamese and other indigenous people, while various formulae are being suggested to fix the qualifying criteria. It is a complicated issue, an instance in recent times being the controversy that erupted over the ‘original inhabitant (OI)’ tag to certain peoples in the national register of citizens (NRC) update process. That a considerable number of indigenous people have been excluded from final NRC shows how fraught the exercise has been. This newspaper has reported that the State Home and Political department had sought a proper definition of the term ‘indigenous’ and suggested 1951 NRC as a likely basis, but the Revenue and Disaster Management department in charge of preparing the draft new land policy merely ‘noted’ the suggestion. Ostensibly there is little the Revenue and Disaster Management department can really do about this, because defining the term ‘indigenous’ does not come within its purview. If these organs of the government are unable to define and agree who the indigenous peoples are, if the latest attempt to do so by yet another committee (albeit in the different context of Clause 6) also promises to be a long and tortuous exercise, then it essentially means there is a huge grey area of uncertainty, a hollow, within the new land policy. Its implementation could pose a knotty problem if politically and legally challenged, which would be a pity. After all, the illegal immigrants’ hunger for land is well known, so their votaries would go to any extent to stymie a policy of land for the indigenous. The policy ought to be clearly defined and consistent if it is not to be defeated.