Protecting land of indigenous people

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s announcement that his government would soon bring a few laws intended at protecting the land belonging to the indigenous communities of Assam must be welcomed by all. It is a “better late than never” situation. Land has been one attraction for lakhs of migrants from erstwhile East Bengal, erstwhile East Pakistan, and present-day Bangladesh to head for Assam, by any means. While it was an erroneous British colonial policy to declare vacant land in Assam as waste land, the whole story of a serious threat to Assam’s demography, apart from a threat to India’s territorial integrity, has its roots in the Partition of Bengal in 1905 and the clubbing of Assam with the then newly-created Eastern Bengal. While a section of Leftist scholars continue to justify the immigration of Muslim peasants from overpopulated East Bengal by denigrating the Assamese and other indigenous communities as lazy and unwilling to work, the fact remains that the influx of Muslims to Assam has been part of a larger conspiracy to reduce the indigenous communities into a minority. Saadullah, who had beyond doubt played into the Muslim League conspiracy to encourage the latter’s demographic invasion since the first decade of the twentieth century, too had only toed the British line that Assam was full of wasteland. Such was the situation that the number of immigrants, including children born after their arrival, had increased from an estimated three lakhs in 1921 to over half a million in 1931. Steps taken to protect the indigenous people by introducing the Line System in the colonial era and by demarcating exclusive tribal belts and blocks have all proved futile in front of the official patronisation of the migrants by successive Congress governments, particularly after the demise of Bimala Prasad Chaliha. While Lokapriya Gopinath Bardoloi had attracted the ire of both Nehru and Patel by opposing every move by the Centre in the immediate post-independence period to permit settlement of more immigrants from the then-new-born East Pakistan, it is very important to remember that Bishnuram Medhi and Bimala Prasad Chaliha too had pursued the Bardoloi line by vehemently opposing Nehru’s pressure on Assam to accept immigrants from erstwhile East Bengal and newly-created East Pakistan. Chaliha, in particular, is on record for having thrown out about 1.28 lakh Muslim infiltrators during his tenure, because of which he was reprimanded and humiliated by Nehru in front of government officers. People of Assam must not forget that the Sarat Chandra Sinha government had failed to take any measure to ensure that lakhs of people, mostly Muslims, who had come to Assam as refugees during the Bangladesh liberation struggle were sent back to their country after it became independent. These lakhs of refugees enrolled themselves as voters in Assam, with the then government choosing to look the other way. Had it not been for the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), which launched a massive peaceful and democratic movement demanding detection and deportation of these illegal migrants, the people, whether in Assam or in India, would not have known that illegal migrants had swamped Assam. In this context, it is important to note what the Brahma Committee (constituted by the BJP-led government of Sarbananda Sonowal) observed in its report in 2017. The report has clearly mentioned that Saadullah, who had formed five governments between 1937 and 1946 with the blessings of the Muslim League, had launched a scheme designed as a ‘Grow More Food’ campaign. On the pretext of this scheme, Saadullah brought in lakhs of Bengali Muslim peasants from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and settled them in Assam by giving liberal grants of land in forest reserves, VGRs, PGRs, etc. Besides settling the Muslim peasants by the Saadullah government, vast stretches of char lands and government waste/khas land in lower Assam districts and tribal areas came under the encroachment of Muslim peasants. In this context, it will be worthwhile to note what the Brahma Committee has observed. It said, “In fact, the entire Assam is in the inextricable grip of encroachment of land, particularly by the land-hungry suspected Bangladeshis who fall on any kind of vacant land like the vultures on the corpse, leaving nothing and swallowing everything. Few realise and far less does the government realise that if the trends in organised encroachments on land by these unwanted guests are not stopped immediately and the lands already grabbed are not retrieved by launching a massive policy of eviction of the encroachments systematically supported by a holistic plan, then time is not far when the very identity of Assam, let alone the land rights of the indigenous people of Assam, will be extinguished. The sooner the government of Assam realises this harsh truth, the better for it and for the people of Assam.”