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Assam’s Plan to Expel ‘Illegal Migrants’ Overnight is a New Extrajudicial Model of Mass Disenfranchisement

Angshuman Choudhury

Assam is weaponising a Partition-era law to let officials strip those accused of being illegal migrants of citizenship and expel them in 24 hours—a new model of extra-judicial mass disenfranchisement that may now spread across the country.

On 9 September 2025, the Assam cabinet approved the framing of a new set of “standard operating procedures” (SOP), as the new plan is called in officialese, under the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, to identify, detain and expel supposed illegals.

The announcement came two months after the state’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), announced during a press conference that his government would now invoke the 1950 law to expel ‘illegal migrants’ without relying on the existing Foreigners Tribunals (FT) system.

The SOP, according to the government’s press release, will empower district commissioners (DC) across Assam to summon suspected illegals, demand evidence of their Indian citizenship, make a decision on their citizenship status and finally, order their expulsion or detention within 24 hours.

The DCs will also separately have the power to order the expulsion of those “declared foreign nationals” (DFNs) by an FT. The SOP, further, seeks to formalise the ongoing “pushbacks”—forcing suspected illegals across the border, often at gun point—to Bangladesh “without any further process”.

The proposed SOP is only the latest manifestation of a distinct form of legal lawlessness that the Assam government has been perfecting over the last few months as part of its multi-pronged offensive against the state’s Bengali Muslim minority.

Majoritarian Lawfare

You can call the Sarma government’s plan majoritarian lawfare, designed and executed with the specific intent of driving fear and anxiety among religious minorities while unifying the Hindutva vote bank in the run up to next year’s assembly election.

The state government has argued that an October 2024 Supreme Court judgement on the Assam-specific section 6A of the Citizenship Act 1955 allows it to freely use the 1950 act to expel illegals. But, this is legal cherry-picking, done with the political intent to justify an unjustifiable policy.

As a legal commentator at the Centre for Justice and Peace (CJP), a human rights and legal aid group working closely on the Assam context, has argued, the apex court saw the 1950 act as part of the existing FT-centred regime of foreigner detection in the state, and not as something that can substitute or override the tribunal process.

In other words, the Sarma government has used the most orthodox and draconian reading of the bench’s opinion to rationalise its expulsion policy.

The Sarma government, in bypassing longstanding legal norms, also intends to position itself as an intrepid leader of an exasperated and impatient majority who has no time for a slow-moving judicial system.

In this context, the proposed SOP reflects an incremental mutation of the Assam government’s stance towards the judicial framework on citizenship determination—from compliance to acquiescence to rejection.

It marks the rise of an authoritarian executive state in which powerful political forces can use their popular mandate to sideline the judiciary (and constitutional law) on their whim. This is a subversion of the delicate relationship between the legislature, executive and judiciary, which is fundamental to the integrity of any modern constitutional democracy.

Escalation of Illiberal Intent

While the new SOP mirrors the existing FT regime in many ways, it is an escalation of illiberal intent and action around citizenship determination. As a domain of law, citizenship determination is complex and carries high stakes because it can have devastating consequences on the lives of vulnerable individuals.

Therefore, the process demands cautious scrutiny of documentary evidence by trained judicial officers.

By allowing bureaucrats who have no judicial training or any experience in the specialized field of citizenship determination to dabble in it freely, the government is formalising a thoroughly discretionary, opaque and arbitrary regime of large-scale disenfranchisement.

It also appears from the cabinet note that legal safeguards, such as the right to appeal, are completely absent in this new regime. It is not difficult to see how such a system would create precarity at a mass scale.

To be clear, the quasi-judicial FT system in Assam too is arbitrary, opaque and discretionary—as a July 2025 report by the National Law School of India University Bangalore and Queen Mary University of London confirms. It, too, is manned by untrained or ill-trained members who play fast and loose with judicial norms while adjudicating on citizenship matters.

Overseen by the Assam government’s home and political department, it too is an executive institution without any legislative provenance. Yet, the FT regime offers some semblance, even if illusionary, of institutional justice. Individuals suspected of being trespassers are able to defend themselves through lawyers in front of a bench and subsequently, appeal at higher courts to challenge adverse orders.

Obliterating Judicial Culture

Lawyers themselves are able to learn through precedence, even if inconsistently, to defend their clients. The new bureaucratic regime seeks to obliterate even that minimalist judicial culture by vesting all decision-making powers on the district administration.

While the FTs would continue to operate on the side, the proposed SOP reveals a larger political intent on the BJP’s part to eventually scale it down.

Once DCs take on the task of identifying DFNs, the FT regime would lose its relevance, which could then serve as an administrative rationale for the state government to defund it. Sure, the quasi-judicial FTs must be abolished—but not if they are replaced by a non-judicial and arguably anarchic regime of citizenship determination.

Indeed, the executive system could end up transplanting the competitive, performance-based system of the FT regime into the bureaucracy. DCs would now be under pressure to produce illegal foreigners out of thin air just to demonstrate their administrative performance and avail lucrative promotions. Such a system would actively encourage, rather than prevent, disenfranchisement.

Absurd and Cruel

If the overall structure wasn’t bad enough, specific provisions in the proposed SOP are both absurd and cruel. They give the suspected ‘illegal’ merely 10 days to prove their Indian citizenship to the DC—a painfully short period of time to prove documentary citizenship, especially for the unlettered and marginalized.

Over the years, thousands have presented reams of convoluted paperwork before the FTs to prove their Indian citizenship (here, here and here), only to be de-nationalised and in some cases, detained or deported. If a quasi-judicial institution failed to judge documentary evidence on their merit (as also once observed by the Gauhati High Court), how can then one expect non-judicial authorities, like DCs, to justly and transparently ascertain the citizenship of people?

The proposed SOP further empowers the DCs to order the expulsion of DFNs assuming that “no identification process is necessary” in their case as “they may have already exhausted remedies available by approaching the High Court and the Supreme Court.”

This is a serious leap of judgment.

What if a DFN has an appeal pending at one of these courts? Can the district administration still expel them?

By keeping the language broad and vague, the proposed SOP could justify a sweeping expulsion regime that subverts the judicial appeal process itself—as has already reportedly happened in Assam with the forced expulsion of Bengali Muslims who have cases pending at higher courts.

The proposed SOP also expects an individual identified as a foreigner to “remove himself”. One wonders if the government wants people to just pack up and walk into Bangladesh—an impossible prospect for someone who may not have any intergenerational links, family or friends across the border.

An Arbitrary, Carceral Regime

The proposed SOP seeks to formalise the term ‘holding centre’ to replace ‘Transit Camp’, which is what the government currently calls the sole foreigner detention centre in Assam’s Goalpara district.

Police in some other BJP-ruled states are now using the term “holding centre” to characterise facilities used to detain suspected “illegal immigrants”.

Such strategic use of bureaucratic language is aimed at creating an arbitrary and informal carceral regime that does not have to fulfil the legal denotations of “detention” or “transit”, terms generally used for individuals awaiting formal deportation to other countries.

It is also important to highlight how the Assam SOP plays on historical trauma. The 1950 act, designed to deter cross-border migration of people from East Pakistan to Assam after the 1947 Partition, was a response, perhaps even an overreaction, to ethno-nationalist anxieties rippling through a landscape battered by sectarian violence and hatred.

By invoking the same act, the BJP government appears to be suggesting to its wider electorate that it will finish the unfinished task of the Partition by sending Bengali Muslims back to ‘their own country’ across the Radcliffe Line.

This is, of course, a perverse extrapolation of history, but is in line with the larger politics of Hindutva, which seeks to weaponise the Partition to justify the creation of a Hindu rashtra or Hindu nation. In the process, the festering wounds of 1947 continue to singe deeper into India’s body politic.

Inspiring Other States

The Assam model of citizenship determination through executive force is already being replicated in other BJP-ruled states where governments are directing district authorities to identify and expel suspected illegals without relying on any judicial or quasi-judicial authority.

Other aspects of the model are appearing elsewhere. The Election Commission of India is planning a countrywide voter roll revision, replicating Assam’s longstanding doubtful-voter model.

“Holding centres”, mirroring Assam’s detention centre, have popped up in the National Capital Region and following a recent union home ministry directive, are soon likely to surface in other states too.

We see the emergence of a mutually reinforcing regime of disenfranchisement in which Assam and other states learn from each other to find the most effective and quickest way to remove the undesirable other.

(Angshuman Choudhury is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Asian Studies jointly at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London. He is also a Board Member at the Development and Justice Initiative. Courtesy: Article 14.com, a joint effort between lawyers, journalists, and academics that provides intensive research and reportage, data and varied perspectives on issues necessary to safeguard democracy and the rule of law.)

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Corrosive Rhetoric Against Bengali-Speaking Muslims is Tearing Assam Apart

Harsh Mander

The frontier state of Assam – incidentally the land of my birth – is today seething with animosity, fear and resentment. It is tearing apart. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has done all he can to weaponise the legitimate anxieties of the Assamese people concerning indigeneity and land, to manufacture and stoke hatred against Assamese Muslims of Bengali origin. This is a community that is both a religious and linguistic minority in Assam. He constructs them as the foremost enemy of the indigenous Assamese people.

The parallels that he draws with Israel are particularly telling. Indigenous Assamese people, who he says are in a minority in 12 of the state’s 35 districts, should learn from Israel ways to survive and prosper despite being surrounded by “enemies”. He declared at a programme to commemorate the martyrs of the Assam agitation of the 1970s and ’80s, “I would urge Assamese to learn from Israel. In the Middle East that country is surrounded by Muslim fundamentalists. With Iran and Iraq as neighbours, Israel with a small population has become an impregnable society…”

What he unfailingly glosses over is that the Assam agitation was never a struggle against people of any religious identity. It opposed Bengali immigrants in Assam, agnostic if they were Hindu or Muslim. The Assam agitation and the Assam accord of 1985 made no distinction between Hindu and Muslim “foreigners” residing in Assam because, as Sangeeta Barooah underlines “the popular anxiety was about Axomiya identity, a regional sentiment, hinged on the fear of losing their home, hearth and language to ‘outsiders’ from Bangladesh, both Hindus or Muslims”.

Sarma instead portrays just Assamese Muslims of Bengali origin as the dangerous “other”, the “infiltrator”, the enemy that threatens the future of the people to whom Assam rightfully (and exclusively) belongs. This is a profound shift transforming an ethno-nationalist movement to a stridently communal one, targeting only people of Bengali origin of Muslim identity. He has gone so far as to direct the Foreigners’ Tribunals to drop all cases of Hindu Bangladeshis who entered Assam until 2014, and pursue cases only against Muslims.

Take his Independence Day speech while raising the national flag. He chose this occasion to passionately warn that the state’s indigenous identity is facing its greatest-ever threat from “illegal infiltration”. He urged every indigenous Assamese to stand together to protect their land, culture, and way of life.

“This is not just a political issue, it is a battle for our very existence,” he pronounced. “If we remain silent, within the next decade we will lose our identity, our land, and everything that makes us Assamese”. He added that the state was facing various forms of “jihad” – from love to land – which he claimed were aimed at weakening indigenous control. “This is the biggest challenge Assam has ever faced. Our fight today will inspire the next generation to keep our identity alive.”

His speech in many ways echoed that of the prime minister from the Red Fort. Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned the nation about a “well-thought-out conspiracy” to alter India’s population composition. “These infiltrators,” he alleged, “are snatching the livelihood of the youth of my country. They are targeting our sisters and daughters. They are misleading the Adivasis and grabbing their lands. This will not be tolerated.”

He added, “No country can surrender before infiltrators. Then how can we?”

For both Sarma and Modi, the highly emotionally loaded appellation “infiltrator” signals Muslims alone. For them, Bengali Hindus who might have crossed the border are never infiltrators. They are refugees escaping persecution, for whom the doors of Hindu India must always stay wide open.

The threats posed by this “enemy within”, and their alleged sinister conspiracies or jihads against the indigenous Assamese people has been the staple of Sarma’s politics. He goes so far as to describe Assam’s Muslim majority districts as “mini-Bangladesh”. “Today you see in the neighbouring Bangladesh, where 35% of the population was Hindu, today the number of Hindus there has become 8%, the temples have been demolished”. He speaks of these dangers looming in Barpeta, Morigaon and Dhubri districts. Dhubri just has 12% Hindu population, only a little higher than Bangladesh’s 8%.

He makes the fallacious but potentially incendiary claim that the Muslim population in Assam has skyrocketed from 12% in 1951 to 40%, threatening the state’s identity. However, his resort to scare-mongering is not based on fact. To begin with, in the 1951 census Muslims comprised 24.68% or nearly a quarter of the population. This rose to 34.22% in 2011. Since then, there has been no population census, therefore there are no scientific grounds to estimate a rise of Assamese Muslim populations to 40%.

This “changing demography” of Assam, he pronounces, is a “matter of life and death”. Because of the rise of Muslim population, he says that people from the community are visible in almost every sphere of life. “If you travel in app cabs in Guwahati, you will find that nine out of 10 are from one particular religion.”

He further suggests that it is only fear of the government machinery backed by police and military that keeps “some people” in check. It is because of this Hindus of the state are protected. He takes personal credit for this: “Our temples and women are safe because everyone knows whose government is in Assam.” He warns, “The day that fear is broken, we will see the scene in Bangladesh today everywhere in Assam except [the Hindu majority] upper districts of Assam. And that is the real truth of our lives.”

He presages forebodingly a “dangerous dark future”. He claims that by 2041, Assam would become a Muslim-majority state. “It’s a reality and nobody can stop it.” He warns that after two decades, the Independence Day flag would be hoisted by “an unfamiliar chief minister”. “Our holy country, our Hindu nation and our religion are under threat. They are planning to sell, convert and destroy our country.” Once again it is clear that for him, Muslims do not belong to “our” country.

He frequently charges Muslim minorities in Assam of engaging in so-called land jihad and love jihad, which the state must crush decisively. He alleges that lands belonging to indigenous people in Assam are being acquired by “a specific community” and announced plans for a new law to regulate land sales between religious communities.

The proposed legislation would restrict sale of land between people of different faiths without the prior permission of the state government. Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat describes the proposed legislation as “absolutely outrageous”. But Sarma is adamant, saying “People from a particular community kept snatching land from our indigenous people there and today we are in the minority in our own land.” His use of the words “we” and “our” are telling because these excludes Bengali-origin Muslims.

Also, he had announced that the state government would soon introduce a new law mandating life imprisonment for those convicted of “love jihad”. This became necessary, Sarma claims, because Muslim men marry Hindu girls by impersonating Hindu men on social media. “In Assam, this is rampant,” he said. “People put their Hindu names on Facebook, lure a girl and after marriage the girl discovers that the boy is not the same boy whom she married”.

He also reveals plans for a new domicile policy that restricts state government employment only to Assamese-born persons.

In another swipe at Muslim residents of Assam, the Assam Legislative Assembly officially amended the rule going back for decades providing for two-hour break on Fridays to facilitate Muslim legislators to offer Fridays prayers.

These decisions all aim at “protecting the rights of indigenous people”.

He often resorts to communal hate terminology. Madrassas he said are “factories for manufacturing mullahs” which the government should shut down, and the Muslim population are “Babar, Akbar and the Aurangzeb”.

He does not even balk from openly inciting violence. Speaking to Hindu youth, he says, “The young [people] present here, I know these are the days that you should eat and play, but these are also the days that you should pick up swords.” Defying the Constitution, he exhorts, “Only vote for those who promise that they will declare India as a Hindu nation.” In an election rally in Jharkhand he declares, “I ignite fire against infiltrators. Lord Hanuman had also set fire in Lanka. We have to set fire against infiltrators and make Jharkhand a golden land.”

Not just land and love jihad. He never tires of charging Muslims with many other “jihads” as well. Some of these conspiracy claims are so fantastical that they sound like spoofs, except that Sarma is dead serious. When Guwahati was submerged in flood waters, for instance, he laid the blame on “flood jihad” waged by a private university of Meghalaya which, he claimed, demolished hills on its campus leading to large-scale water logging in Guwahati. (This incidentally was the only private university in the North East to find a place in the top 200 in the National Institutional Ranking Framework 2024 released by the Union Ministry of Education.)

In exasperation, Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi posted on social media, “Can someone stop the Chief Minister of Assam Himanta Biswa from his jihad of repeated nonsense?” Sarma however was unfazed. “What they are doing is the ‘baap’ of jihad. Jihad is too small a word for it,” he said. He also derided the university entrance’s domed structure which he said is reminiscent of Mecca, claiming this posed a threat to Assamese culture and heritage.

When prices of vegetables and fruits soared, again he claimed this to be the result of a jihad by Miya Muslims. Recently he appealed to Assamese people to avoid buying fish produced by “Miya Muslim” fish producers, claiming that they excessively use urea that causes kidney diseases. He tauntingly urged Assamese to rear pigs because “that’s something Miyas won’t steal.”

“I will take sides”, he declared defiantly in the state assembly. “What can you do about it …So that Miya Muslims can take over Assam? We won’t let it happen.”

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Apart from Muslims of Bengali origin, the other “enemy of Assam” constructed by Sarma is people who stand for the rights of this beleaguered community. For this reason, this writer also often finds himself frequently in the crosshairs of the Assam chief minister. On many occasions he has claimed to reporters that I played a “big role in ruining the NRC” by defending “illegal infiltrators” with the aim of sabotaging the National Register of Citizens process. Also, that I was encouraging encroachers, mostly of Bangladesh-origin Muslims, to resist and challenge the legal eviction drives of the government on tribal and forest land in the state, and that this has fuelled tensions

In the Assam legislative assembly, he announced, “During NRC people like Harsh Mander came here, and launched such a big conspiracy against Assam that no newspaper, no television could track. Harsh Mander and some so-called local Supreme Court [lawyers]… created a chain to make people Indian…And if during my days Harsh Mander would have come here, I would have put him in jail. If NRC was done when I was the chief minister – I would have done khallas – through the process of law. I would not have allowed him to mount such big … conspiracy against Assam.”

His attacks became even more shrill after a group of concerned citizens recently constituted a People’s Tribunal to travel to Assam to investigate charges of massive demolitions and evictions targeting Assamese Muslims of Bengali origin. I was one of the convenors of this tribunal. Sarma was not restrained by the fact that many members of the tribunal were people with impeccable credentials. There was a former chairperson of the National Minorities Commission Wajahat Habibullah, former member of the Planning Commission Syeda Hameed, former MP Jawhar Sarkar and leading public interest lawyer Prashant Bhushan.

Sarma alluded to “strange people” visiting Assam, alleging that their sole aim was to paint the lawful evictions as a “humanitarian crisis”: “This is nothing but a planned attempt to weaken our fight against illegal encroachers. We are alert and firm – no propaganda or pressure will stop us from protecting our land and culture.”

On our arrival in Guwahati on August 23, we were told that the state government had slapped prohibitory orders in the district that we had earlier announced we would visit. This was Goalpara, where massive evictions had taken place. Wajahat Habibullah, young lawyer Fawaz Shaheen and I decided to nonetheless travel to Goalpara. We were continuously trailed by the police and barred from visiting the sites of the demolitions. But we still met in the home of the local legislator some among the 1,600 people whose homes were demolished.

Sarma’s attacks peaked further after a heartfelt appeal for ordinary humanity by Syeda Hameed was deliberately distorted by the media and political class in Assam. When pressed by reporters for her views about Bangladeshi infiltrators, she said they too were human beings – Allah ke bande. The world should be large enough to accommodate them. Sarma took little time to claim that Syeda Hameed “legitimises illegal infiltrators”.

“They seek to realise Jinnah’s dream of making Assam a part of Pakistan,” he said in a tweet. “Today Assamese identity is on the brink of extinction because of the tacit support of people like her. But we are the sons and daughters of Lachit Barphukan, WE WILL FIGHT till the last drop of our blood to save our State and our identity. Let me make it very clear, Bangladeshis are not welcome in Assam, it is not their land. Anyone sympathising with them may accommodate them in their own backyards. Assam is not up for grabs by illegal infiltrators, NOT NOW, NOT EVER.”

At the time I write this, police complaints have been filed against Syeda Hameed in at least 15 Assam districts.

After we returned to Delhi, the members of the Tribunal assembled at the Constitution Club for a press conference to speak of their findings. Some 30 minutes into the event, a noisy mob of around 100 men stormed into the hall, shouting belligerent slogans, closely followed by reporters of many mainstream TV channels. Neatly typed placards were wrapped in bubble plastic. The management of the club – which was constituted for meetings of members of parliament – did nothing to restrain the mob. The police arrived more than an hour after the mob had dispersed.

The mob was led, by their own admission, by Vishnu Gupta of the Hindu Sena and Chaudhary Baliyan of Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh. The slogans they shouted included “Goli maro saalon ko, desh ke gaddaron ko”, “Joote maro saalon ko”, “Jai Shri Ram” and “Har Har Mahadev”. Their hectoring was directed at the dais where, apart from members of the tribunal, sat former Chief Justice Patna Iqbal Ansari, former union home secretary Gopal Pillai and public intellectual Apoorvanand. Alarmed by this, a group of young men from the audience and organisers formed a protective ring around the dais.

The tribunal continued its press conference after the group left. Syeda Hameed rose with fortitude and dignity to reveal that the threatening group brought back painful childhood memories of Partition, when mobs had swooped down on her family in Panipat.

We found later that Vishnu Gupta and his Hindu Sena have a long and colourful history of disruption and criminal conduct, with several FIRs against them for assault, vandalism, and spreading misinformation. Gupta was arrested in 2011 for assaulting lawyer Prashant Bhushan inside his chamber, detained in 2015 for making a false complaint about beef being served in Kerala House, and again arrested in 2016 for vandalising the Pakistan International Airlines office in Delhi. He also organised a massive public celebration of the birthday of Donald Trump. A scan of the social media also revealed that skull-capped Chaudhary Baliyan shares close ties with the chief minister of Assam, publicly posting photographs with him on social media.

Just hours before the mob disruption, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Assam’s handle posted on X (formerly Twitter) the poster of the press conference of the People’s Tribunal with the words, “Dressing up illegal infiltration is treachery, and those who endorse it stand hand in hand with forces to destabilise Assam and Bharat.”

Sarma from his official X handle again with a poster of the press conference said, “Do whatever you can, but Assam’s soul is invincible – You will not kill our spirit this time.”

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The story that emerged from our meetings with some of the evicted persons from the mass evictions in June and July in Hasila Beel, Paikan, Bethari and Ashudubu villages of Goalpara, was immensely troubling.

It was not recent forest or slum encroachments that the Assam state brought down. There was no ground to believe that the evicted families were “illegal immigrants”. Their settlements were decades old, and were served with a number of government schools, Anganwadi centres, electricity supply, hand pumps, pucca roads, police beat stations, mosques, madrassas, and markets. Among those whose houses were demolished were families who years earlier were displaced by river erosion and settled in these villages by the state itself.

Many had homes built under the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana. They lived in brick and cement dwellings. The adult residents had voted in successive elections, they held job cards, ration cards, Aadhar cards, school certificates and most even had certificates of inclusion in the National Register of Citizens, confirming that they were Indian citizens. Several had land deeds, others had applied for these and these applications were pending for many years.

The state chose the monsoon season to evict more than 1,600 families in these three villages from their homes. No individual notices were served on them. A general notice was pasted maybe 48 hours before the eviction. Scores of armed policemen arrived with the bulldozers that razed the houses, often with people’s belongings still in the homes. People reported not even being given the time to salvage their clothes, documents and livestock. Standing crops were also destroyed. The administration also brought down government schools, Anganwadi centres, madrassas and places of worship.

The borders were sealed. The state did not allow the political opposition, media and rights groups from entering.

To add to their suffering, the state government made no arrangements for temporary relief camps or alternate housing for the thousands rendered homeless overnight. As a result, more than 1,600 families, including children, women, older and ailing people are forced to survive the monsoon fury under canvas sheets that the community erected.

One young man protesting the demolitions was shot and killed at point blank range.

It is this outrage that the chief minister tried to ensure – through his battery of intimidation and prohibitions – that we do not witness.

Just days later, during a programme to commemorate Golap Borbora, the first non-Congress chief minister of Assam, Union home minister Amit Shah lauded the drive led by chief minister Sarma against encroachments by “infiltrators”, the coded word in the BJP-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh lexicon for Muslim persons of Bengali origin. “I appreciate the Assam government’s drive to clear land from infiltrators,” Shah said. “I believe no infiltrators should stay in the country”.

He said that not just forests but also large swathes of land belonging to the Satras (referring to Vaishnavite monasteries) have been “cleared from the infiltrators”. He announced that a staggering total of 1.29 lakh acres of land, mostly in five Muslim-majority districts, have been cleared.

Heartened by his praise, Sarma responded, “We will snatch the land from the infiltrators and will be given to indigenous Assamese and Indians”.

His drive would continue “until the last inch of land is snatched from the infiltrators”.

During our time in Guwahati, people often said to us that what we are seeing are simply strenuous efforts of the administration to clear the state of encroachments. These have happened in many states under many governments. You may fault the process that the state followed, but these are not attacks on a particular religious community, they argued.

However, we found that these arguments are disingenuous. Almost every one of the 1,600 families whose homes, schools and shrines have been razed are Assamese Muslims of Bengali origin. The large majority of the 1.29 acres of land that have been cleared of farmlands, homes, schools and shrines that Amit Shah so valorised belonged to Assamese people of Bengali origin. People of other identities have settlements and farmlands that fall within the same legal status, but they have been spared.

These are not ordinary “encroachment removal” drives. What is under way in Assam is a project of ethnic cleansing.

[Harsh Mander is a peace and justice worker, writer, teacher who leads the Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s campaign to fight hate with radical love and solidarity. He teaches part-time at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, and has authored many books, including Partitions of the Heart, Fatal Accidents of Birth and Looking Away. Courtesy: Scroll.in, an Indian digital news publication, whose English edition is edited by Naresh Fernandes.]

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Two Leaves and a Bud From Assam

Syeda Hameed

My uncle Khwaja Ahmed Abbas wrote a story in 1948 titled Sardarji. He read it out to a circle of friends in Srinagar at a writers’ workshop. Everyone was stunned by the powerful narrative. But when the story started appearing in Urdu and Hindi journals in India and Pakistan, a storm began to brew. The Pakistani press declared him wajibul qatl (meriting death). The Indian press followed suit.

The story was based on a real-life incident. In Karol Bagh, an old Sikh neighbour saved his brother and his family and took the bullet shots on his own chest. No one bothered to read and understand the irony of the narrative which concluded with the line, ‘It was not Sardarji who died but it was I, Burhanuddin who had died’… hence the alternative title, Meri Maut.

Both the newly partitioned countries thought he had insulted them. Both countries gave him death sentences. After several months of anguish and suffering, when readers on both sides bothered to read the story until the end, Sikhs all over the country – from the courts to the military dug-outs in Kashmir – embraced him with flowing tears. The Pakistani media, shamefaced, retracted its diatribe.

I have inherited his grit and my family’s humanism.

Assam is a state I have loved not only from my frequent visits during my tenure with the National Commission for Women and Planning Commission, but from back in 1954 when I saw Abbas’s film Rahi with Dev Anand and Nalini Jaywant. It was about tea garden workers who were brutally oppressed by their colonial masters. The song ‘Ek kali aur do patiyan’, which I heard as a child, still rings in my ears.

Abbas wanted to shoot his film in Assam. He writes, “The British tea garden owners chased us out of every garden we visited. Finally we shifted to Nilgiris, an Indian owned plantation near Ooti.” That became the venue for the location shooting. Music and lyrics by Anil Biswas and Prem Dhawan became immortal. The Indian manager, servant of the Brits, wielded his whip and the song ‘Ek kali aur do patiyan jaanen humri sab batiyan’ rose in defiance from every slope of tea gardens.

It was against this background that I visited almost all districts of Assam from 1997 to 2014 during various offices I held. My shelves have many reports and my albums have many photographs. I have friends in several districts, lifelong friends. And suddenly in July 2025, 70 years after I fell in love with Assam, this edifice of love crashed.

On August 23, 2025, six of us embarked on a journey. The mission was to see with our own eyes the mass eviction of Bengali Muslim families from various parts of the state. The team visited Goalpara and Borduar. A public meeting followed the visit. Prashant Bhushan, Wajahat Habibullah, Jawhar Sircar, Harsh Mander, Fawaz Shaheen and Syeda Hameed. We all spoke about our experiences. After the meeting, we descended the stage into the arms of the Assamese media. They asked and we responded. Our stand was that all humans should be treated with humaneness. Whether they were Muslims, Bengalis or Bangladeshis. Insaniyat and Bhupen Hazarika’s humanism were the lessons we had grown up with, even towards purported enemies. I did not realise that even the polite Assam media had not understood me. I have always loved Assam and had spoken to Assamese media for almost a quarter century. That night the barrage began in the Assamese press.

We reached Delhi and as per practice, the next day was the press conference at the Constitution Club. As I was about to get down from the car, young women thrust mikes almost into my mouth, screaming a volley of questions. I tried to say, come to the conference and ask your questions there. The mike thrusts were unstoppable. I said, ‘Look, I am like your mother. Would you do this to her?’ With difficulty I got inside. The meeting began. What happened next is common knowledge; a crowd entered the Deputy Speakers Hall, flinging placards at me which could have hit any of my colleagues on the stage. Some sported skull caps, some were saffron clad. All young men. Our own young friends made a cordon around the podium. The crowd shouted, they threatened and finally left. At that moment two images flashed in my mind. One was the communal riots in 1947; second was 1989, Safdar Hashmi shot in Sahibabad. Was the mob searched for guns before they entered Constitution Club?

Despite the onslaught, our testimonies continued. Not a single one of those microphone wielders entered the conference hall. Two hours later, the meeting ended and I walked out. They were all there, young men and women with their mikes poking in my face. Suddenly a woman’s voice rose like thunder, ‘Will you stop it!’ A pair of hands propelled me to the car. ‘Go,’ said a male voice in my ear. As the car moved I heard him scream at the crowd of media-mongers.

People have read the words the honourable Assam chief minister spoke to the media, including that I subscribed to ‘Jinnah’s dream to turn Assam into a part of Pakistan’ and ‘I would not personally file an FIR against her. It would help her raise money for her legal defence and enrich herself but if she returns we will deal with her.’ Other invectives were hurled at me by the minister of parliamentary affairs and by the Assam Students Union.

I want to end with my great grandfather, the poet Maulana Altaf Husain Hali, who wrote these lines in 1874 having experienced the first war of independence in 1857:

Tum agar chahtey ho mulk ki khair

Na kisi hum watan ko samjo ghair

Ho Musalmaan us me ya Hindu

Bodh mazhab ho ya ho Sikh bandhu

Sab ko meethi nigaah se dekho

Samjho aankhon ki putliyaan sab ko

That is my inherited and imbibed creed. Now, at the end of my life, I regret that I will never visit my beautiful Assam. If I am ‘dealt with’ as the chief minister has said, my friends from all over India (including Assam) will be anguished and distraught. But Assam’s two leaves and a bud will go to my grave.

[Syeda Hameed is a writer and the founder chair of the Muslim Women’s Forum. Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu.]