More than 90 families were displaced by an eviction drive in Assam’s Nalbari district on Monday, the second such eviction exercise in the state this month.
According to Nalbari Deputy Commissioner Nibedan Das Patowary, the eviction was carried out to clear encroachment on 453 bighas of village grazing reserve (VGR) land in the Barkhetri revenue circle.
Ahead of the eviction, the district administration had issued prohibitory orders under section 163 of the BNSS in the Bakrikuchi Reserve, disallowing the assembly of more than five people. The order cited a “likelihood of breach of peace and tranquility” there, and in nearby areas, and the need to prevent attempts to “thwart the successful completion of the eviction drive”.
On Monday morning, 12 bulldozers and over 500 police personnel arrived at the site to carry out the eviction.
“There was no untoward incident. There are 93 families living here, and there were 319 houses and other built structures here. Since this is VGR land, it is a policy of the Revenue Department to clear such government lands. When we told them to vacate the area earlier, they went to the Gauhati High Court, but did not get relief there. So now, we gave them seven days’ notice to vacate the area, and most people vacated their homes themselves on Sunday,” DC Patowary told The Indian Express.
The affected families are Bengali-origin Muslims. Like in the case of the eviction drive that took place two weeks earlier in Goalpara district, where over 600 families were evicted from a wetland area, the affected families said they had moved to the area after their previous settlement was lost to river erosion.
“We have been living here for 28-30 years. We moved here in the 1980s from other parts of Barkhetri itself, like the Bhanganmari, Kurihamari, and Bhelengimari panchayats after land was lost to erosion. We occupy only around 80 bighas of land and live bare lives here, with most people working as daily labourers on farms,” said Fakar Uddin Ahmed (40), whose home was demolished on Monday.
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Apprehending an eviction in 2016, residents of the area had approached the Gauhati High Court against it, submitting that they had been in possession of the land since 1981 and that they had settled there because of river erosion.
However, on June 18, a Gauhati High Court Bench of Justice Sanjay Kumar Medhi did not allow an extension of the interim order protecting them from eviction, stating that this is “in view of the clear stand of the State that the land in question is VGR land”.
