by ANKUR SINGH
The state of Assam has become a laboratory of ethnonationalism, with warning signs of genocide ahead.
Momtaj Begum was scared, but there was no time. She immediately started packing everything her family owned — for herself, her husband and their three children.
At 11 o’clock one night in September 2021, thousands of residents of Dhalpur?—?a village on a sandbar in the Brahmaputra River in India’s northeastern state of Assam?—?received notice from the government that they must leave by 10 a.m. the next morning, when their homes would be demolished. State officials claimed the villagers, who lived half a day’s drive from India’s border with Bangladesh, were ?“illegal” immigrants encroaching on government-owned land, despite families having citizenship documents and living there for decades.
While Begum and her neighbors packed, Nur Hussain, a leader in the local All Assam Minority Students Union (AAMSU), messaged villagers frantically on WhatsApp, trying to make a plan. They weren’t going to leave so easily.
In the morning, hundreds of police officers arrived with bulldozers to evict nearly 1,000 Bengali Muslim families. Begum’s husband, Maynal Haque, a 28-year-old farmer, was still packing when a group of neighbors came by, en route to protest the evictions. Begum didn’t want him to go, but Haque pressed her to take his handful of rupees, then left to join the protest.
There, villagers tried to negotiate with the police, asking for more time, to no avail. Hussain returned home, but several thousand people remained. Then he heard the gunshots.
On social media, chaotic videos and photos spread of police firing on protesters. Hussain checked his phone and saw pictures of people who had been shot. According to a study by Assamese researchers, dozens of villagers were left injured or missing. Hussain’s neighbor, a newlywed bride, had been shot in her stomach. Begum’s husband’s bloodied clothes were found near the protest site, but Haque was nowhere to be seen.
Late that night, rumors circulated that two people had been killed, but nobody knew who, since police had taken the bodies. The next day they learned: One was a 12-year-old boy who’d been walking home from the post office. The other was Haque, whose body police returned to where his and Begum’s home once stood.
Today, the land where the villagers lived is a government farming program to employ Assamese speakers?—?the majority of whom are Hindu. One nearby school was turned into a Hindu temple. A local mosque was converted into housing.
It wasn’t the first time that a state led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)?—?the far-right Hindu nationalist party of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi?—?has targeted Muslim communities with what local activists call ?“bulldozer justice.” Since 2020, similar BJP ?“anti-encroachment drives” have been carried out in four other Indian states and Delhi. A February report by Amnesty International concludes that evictions used to target Muslim-owned properties have ?“become a de facto state policy,” ?“hailed and celebrated” by the BJP.
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