by IPSITA CHAKRAVARTY
The violence on display in the video from the eviction drive at Sipajhar points to police brutality that has become endemic to the state.
In a video from Sipajhar in Assam that appeared on social media on Thursday, a photographer pounces on a man lying motionless on the ground, a circle of blood spreading on his chest. The photographer is accompanied by a group of policemen. He is Bijay Baniya, employed by the Darrang district administration, brought to the spot to take pictures of an eviction drive in Sipajhar.
The man lying on the ground is 33-year-old Moinul Haque. In the first few seconds of the video, he had rushed towards a group of policemen, a stick in his hand, and the group of policemen, armed with guns and clad in riot gear, had fallen upon him. Gunshots rang out soon afterwards.
Haque was killed in the attack.
He had lived in Dhalpur 3 in Sipajhar. On Wednesday night, hours before he died in police firing,residents of his village, mostly Muslims of Bengali origin, had been served an eviction notice. They would have to leave their homes so that the Assam government could clear space for organic farming by people considered indigenous to the state.
A deadly lexicon
Most people who watch the video, in Assam and outside, are shocked by Baniya’s ferocity. What kind of hate impels someone to such gratuitous violence on a dead or dying man? Where does it come from?
Baniya’s was not an isolated crime, nor an isolated hate. Decades of politics in Assam have led up to this moment. It has been enabled by the government’s obsession with hunting down so-called foreigners in the name of championing indigenous interests. From the National Register of Citizens, whose stated aim is to weed out “illegal immigrants’’, to the border police to quasi-judicial tribunals that rarely follow any known rule of law, successive governments have devised elaborate mechanisms to feed this obsession. It has helped create a sense of continuous siege among a section of the state’s population.
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