Three days after a peaceful eviction drive in Assam, why did two men die in police firing?

On September 9, government officials arrived at two villages on the banks of the Digaru river in Assam’s Kamprup district to clear the land of unauthorised constructions.

The residents of Kachutali-1 and 2 villages – the majority of them Bengal-origin Muslims from Morigaon district – had built their homes in this low-lying area over decades.

The officials faced little resistance as they went about demolishing the 240-odd houses. They claimed that the drive cleared 248 bighas of land in this “tribal belt”, where only people belonging to the Scheduled Tribes were eligible to hold land titles.

Their homes razed, the evicted families kept their belongings – dismantled roofs, beds, almirahs and utensils – on the vacated land or homes of their immediate neighbours.

Three days later, on September 12, the officials came back – and served them a two-hour deadline. “They wanted us to leave for good, they thought we were occupying the land again,” said 30-year old Monowara Begum, who lost her home in the eviction drive. “We asked for time but they did not agree.”

This time, the villagers resisted. According to the police, around 11 am, they pelted stones at government officials overseeing the “eviction proceedings” and attacked them with sharp weapons.

The police opened fire, leading to the deaths of two young men – 19-year-old Haidar Ali and 18-year-old Jubahir Ali. Thirty-three people, including 22 government or police officials, were injured in the clash.

According to his family members, Haidar Ali was neither protesting nor part of the crowd that clashed with the police. “He had no reason to protest as our house was not affected by the eviction drive,” said Ali’s distraught father Makbul Hussain.

The residents of Kachutali-1 and 2 villages have blamed the police for instigating the violence. It is when police officials threw away grain and drinking water, and threatened them with guns that a group of hundred-odd villagers retaliated, they alleged.

The Assam director general of police GP Singh said it was a “targeted attack by miscreants” and the police “resorted to authorised use of force following due process”.

Since 2016, when the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in Assam, this is the third instance of Bengali-origin Muslims being killed in police firing while protesting an eviction drive.

The Assam Congress has called for a high-level inquiry into the deaths. Akhil Gogoi, the leader of the Rajjor Dal, condemned the incident. “Let's oppose such ghastly attacks sponsored by the state against the people,” he tweeted.

Chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma defended the eviction and insinuated that the displaced people were illegal migrants. “We will evict all the suspected citizens who have settled in the tribal belt,” Sarma said.

The victims

On the morning after the shootings, the silence in Kachutali-1 village was broken by the sobs of grieving relatives.

“They have killed my son. We want justice for this,” said Sharbano Khatun, the mother of Haidar Ali, weeping as she sat on the floor, surrounded by relatives.

The 19-year-old young man was the youngest of nine siblings and earned a living by ferrying people in an e-rickshaw. “He left home on his e-rickshaw at around 8 am with schoolchildren and went to Sonapur town like every day,” said his father Makbul Hussain. “He was returning home in the afternoon when he was hit by a bullet.”

That day, about 2 km from Haidar Ali’s home, residents from Kachutali-2 village began to gather as news of the clash between police and villagers spread, and as they heard the sound of the gunfire.

Gias Uddin, who works in a nearby cement factory as a daily wager, said “the people lost their patience”. “They went out to see what happened. In that melee, my son also went,” Uddin said.

His 18-year-old-son Jubahir Ali was shot dead soon after. His mother Kulsuma Begum said the police “first shot him and threw him into the pond”. Several villagers confirmed her account.

As she wept, Begum lamented: “We vote for the government, and the same government has killed my son.”

Other villagers said the police opened fire without discretion. Ayesha Khatun, a 40-year-old woman, said she had stepped out of her home when she was hit in the thigh by a bullet. “I was looking for my sons. Out of nowhere, the bullet hit me. They were firing indiscriminately. If they had fired in the sky, the bullet would not have hit me," she said, as she was being taken to the operation theatre at Gauhati Medical College and Hospital.

The provocation

Many residents said that the police action on September 13, even before the 150-odd desperate families could figure out where to go, had angered them. They also accused the police of damaging their meagre belongings, throwing away their foodgrain and polluting the well that was their one source of water.

“They would not even allow us to stay in our neighbours’ houses,” said Monowara Begum.

Mala Khatun, another resident, also alleged that the police officials threw away the foodgrain they had stored in buckets and bags. “The well, our only water source, was broken and damaged. We panicked. Where will we get food and water? The children had not eaten for a day. That’s why the residents chased the police. ”

Monowara Begum said the police officials asked them to return to where they had come from. “But where will we go? We have not come from anywhere else. We are from here only. We have got voter and ration cards, we are recipients of government schemes too.”

Of the 700-odd families in the two villages, about 70-80 families have been living here before Independence, said Mainal Haque Choudhry, a Kachutali resident and former president of Sonapur panchayat. “The rest have settled here over the last 30-40 years. Most of them used to live on the banks of Brahmaputra but lost homes to erosion.”

A series of evictions

Since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in Assam in 2016, more than 10,620 families – majority of them Muslim – have been ousted from government land, according to data provided by the state revenue and disaster management department last month.

Only 630 families have been given any form of rehabilitation.

The evictions have popular support, especially when directed against Bengali-origin Muslims, who are often reviled as Bangladeshis in the state. In this case, the All Assam Tribal Sangha, an umbrella body of existing tribal groups, has praised chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma for freeing tribal land in Katchuli from “encroachers”.

Leaders of Veer Lachit Sena, a nativist group who claims to represent the interest of ethnic Assamese groups, said that the tribal belt belongs to “tribals not to Bangladeshis”. “If there is any attack, there will be retaliation,” Shrinkhal Chaliha, the leader of the group, said in Sonapur.

“We can’t accept that Assam police personnel will be beaten by Bangladeshis, we will not allow it to happen,” Chaliha added. “If they [police] can’t vacate tribal land, Himanta Biswa Sarma should provide AK-47 rifles to tribals who live here,” Chaliha said.

In 2016, after the Bharatiya Janata Party first came to power in Assam, two Bengali-origin Muslims were killed in police firing while protesting an eviction drive near the Kaziranga National Park.

Two years ago in September, the Assam police opened fire at villagers protesting another eviction in the adjoining Darrang district’s Dholpur area, killing two civilians. Several others sustained bullet injuries.

Since then, most residents do not put up much resistance.

The Bangladeshi slur

Many residents of the two villages said they were also angered by media portrayal of them as “illegals” and“Bangladeshis” and a “mob of illegal Bangladesh-origin settlers”. Some alleged that police officials, too, called them such names during the eviction process.

“The eviction was done peacefully, we are not against being removed from government land,” said Rezaul Karim, 21-year-old resident of Kachutali-2. “But why do they [police and the civil administration] call us illegal Bangladeshis without proof?”

Karim said all the residents, barring a few, in the area had made it to the list of National Register of Citizens in 2019. Assam’s NRC is meant to be a list of Indian citizens living in the state, updated after seven decades to weed out so-called illegal immigrants.

Mainal Haque Choudhry, the former president of Sonapur panchayat, said the families who had settled in the area before Independence possessed land deeds and titles.

“The pre-independence Assamese medium Kachutali lower primary school is testimony to that,” Choudhry said. “The land for the school was donated by my grandfather Haji Abdul Rahim Choudhry.”

Others pointed out that Bengali Hindus who had built homes on government land in Kachutali were not evicted. “There are about 50 Hindu Bengali families, but their houses were not touched,” said Shahjahan Ali, a local from the area.

On Friday, the Sonapur circle officer issued notices to other “unauthorized” and "illegal” inhabitants on the land to vacate the villages within three days.

“About 200 families left on Sunday after the notification,” Haque said.

All photographs by Rokibuz Zaman.