Assam Evicts 1,100 Muslim Families, Demolishes 10 Mosques

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government in India’s Assam state has evicted more than 1,100 Muslim families over two days, most of them Bengali Muslims. The eviction drives were carried out in Nagaon, Golaghat and Hojai districts.

Eviction drives targeting marginalised communities, particularly Bengali Muslims, have become a recurring feature in the state.

On the second day of the operation, Sunday, authorities demolished the homes of more than 600 Muslim families in the Lutumari Longjap Reserved Forest in Nagaon district. Officials claimed that the families had been living on forest land they had occupied illegally.

A day earlier, on Saturday, 547 families were evicted across the three districts amid tight security. Of these, 336 families were in Nagaon, 152 in Hojai and 59 in Golaghat.

The families evicted from Lutumari had been living on more than 300 hectares of land within the reserved forest for decades.

According to a report by Scroll, local residents rejected allegations of land encroachment. They said they had primarily worked as forest department labourers and that the government had arranged for them to settle in the area.

In June, the All India Union of Forest Working People urged the Assam government to abandon plans to evict villagers from the Lutumari Longjap Reserved Forest. The organisation argued that residents of four villages in the area had settled there under the colonial-era taungya system of forest management. Therefore, it said, they should not be treated as ordinary illegal occupants.

Quoting Abdul Nur, a 44-year-old Lutumari resident who lost his home in Sunday’s eviction drive, the news outlet reported him as saying, “The government arranged for us to settle here in 1974. We originally came from the nearby town of Juria. Since our ancestors were landless, the government arranged for us to establish settlements here. In total, 300 landless families were given four bighas of land each.”

Meanwhile, more than 10 mosques were demolished during the eviction drive, according to Scroll. Some of the mosques were more than 50 years old.

Source: Maktub Media