Evicting encroachers from government lands in Assam

Assam has been in the media headlines for many days lately due to a series of massive eviction drives to reclaim thousands of government as well as forest-wetlands in various parts of the north-eastern state.

- NAVA THAKURIA

No doubt, regular evictions of encroachment, post-eviction reflections, and alleged forgetfulness often narrate the story of government initiatives to recover lands from the encroachers.

So whenever a declared eviction drive surfaces against illegal settlers on government grazing fields, forest lands (including wetland) or other reserved areas, it invites some 'highly sensitive' journalist-intellectuals to describe the sorrow of those evicted families in the media with the additional inputs from opposition parties. It usually gets multiplied by another section of 'ultra-humanists' and slowly the issue goes beyond public views. People soon forget, and many encroachers swiftly return to the location to reoccupy the land, using the same logic that they had nowhere to go, as their 'ancestral' lands were washed away during perennial waves of flooding. Everybody (including the government agencies) forgets the cycles of encroachment-eviction-rehabilitation, pursuing no pragmatic follow-up actions.

Now, a new narrative is being pushed to establish that the reclaimed lands from the encroachers will be allotted to the corporate groups (as the State government assured lands for several companies after the Advantage Assam 2.0 initiative). So the propagators make it sure that the eviction drive needs to be halted, as the corporate organisations will only exploit the resources with little or no economic benefits to the locals. They also try to convince the common people that the corporate groups are more destructive than the encroachers, even though many of them are suspected Bangladeshi nationals. Probably a critical time has arrived for the indigenous (Asomiya) people to decide who they presume more dangerous- the corporate or the illegal migrants (against whom Assam witnessed a six-year-long agitation in the 1980s).