Assam govt carries out eviction drive to clear 'encroachment' on 1,140 bigha forest land

Goalpara (Assam): The Assam government on Sunday began an eviction drive to clear alleged encroachment on 1,140 bighas (over 376 acres) of forest land in Goalpara district, affecting nearly 600 families, officials said.

According to Goalpara District Commissioner Prodip Timung, the exercise is going "on peacefully" to clear the encroached area in Dahikata Reserve Forest.

"There were 580 families who had encroached on 1,140 bighas of land. The notices were issued to them more than 15 days ago to vacate the areas," he told reporters.

Around 70 per cent of the "illegal settlers" of the area have already left the place after getting the notices, while the remaining are in the process of vacating their houses, Timung said.

"Though we had set two days for the eviction drive, the administration hopes to complete the exercise today. So far, we have not received any resistance. We are demolishing the remaining houses on the encroached land," he added.

The DC said the district administration engaged adequate security personnel and used dozens of excavators along with scores of tractors during the eviction exercise.

"We have divided the area into five blocks, and in only one block, some people are still there. In the other blocks, 80 per cent of the people have left," he added.

Timung said that the eviction drive is underway as per the Gauhati High Court directives, with three petitions regarding the operation heard earlier by the court.

Another senior official said the alleged encroachers are mostly from the Bengali-speaking Muslim community.

Abdul Karim, one of the affected people, claimed that the people in the area have been living there for several decades.

"If we were encroachers, why did the government give us electricity lines, toilets and other facilities? We have Aadhaar cards and all land documents, but still we are being treated as outsiders," he said.

Special Chief Secretary (Forest) M K Yadava claimed that the evicted area falls under the elephant corridor and clearing of the land from encroachment will help reduce man-animal conflict.

Since the Himanta Biswa Sarma-led government came to power in 2021, it has carried out a series of evictions to clear alleged encroachments on land, mostly affecting the Bengali-speaking Muslim population.

On November 3, the Assam chief minister asserted that eviction drives to clear encroachments will continue and "illegal Miyas" cannot have peace under his government.

'Miya' is originally a pejorative term used for Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam, and the non-Bengali-speaking people generally identify them as Bangladeshi immigrants.

In recent years, activists from the community have started adopting this term as a gesture of defiance.

On July 21, the CM had said that 1.29 lakh bighas (over 42,500 acres) have been cleared of encroachment in the last four years, and around 29 lakh bighas (more than 9.5 lakh acres) of land are still encroached in the state.

Sarma had claimed that these huge amounts of land were under encroachment of "illegal Bangladeshis and doubtful citizens" in the state.