Guwahati: Even as a campaign against ‘Miyas’ in parts of upper Assam is getting intensified, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma appealed to people not to take law into their own hands.
Miya is a pejorative term for Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam.
Sarma said places like Lakhimpur, Jorhat, Sivasagar are the “borghar” (heartland) of the Assamese.
“If somebody enters our borghar and nobody speaks up, who will rescue the ‘jati’ (race)?” he asked.
He called for raising a voice against it and agitating but within the law.
“The situation will deteriorate if somebody attempts to wipe out the Assamese. When somebody enters our borghar, it is natural that people will speak up against it,” he said.
The Bengali-speaking Muslims are concentrated in southern, western, central and northern Assam. Upper Assam is the state’s eastern part.
Sarma said if people had encroached upon government land after being affected by riverbank erosion, they would have grabbed a small plot of land. He mentioned that people grabbed lands measuring up to 200 to 300 bighas in some places.
The ongoing “Miya Kheda Andolan” (movement to drive out Miyas) in upper Assam followed eviction drives carried out by the state government in Dhubri, Goalpara, Lakhimpur and Golaghat districts. Thousands of people, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims, were evicted.
Recently, Sarma had called upon people not to give shelter to the evictees or else, he said, the “position of our people” that improved through evictions and other means would become “bad again.”
There have been at least three incidents of confrontation in Sivasagar district when the members of some non-Muslim indigenous groups and organisations raided the houses of Assamese Muslims in search of Miya workers. These groups and organisations vowed not to rest until the Miyas are driven out of upper Assam.
The All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) backed the eviction drives by the state government.
Stating that the exercise should continue to clear encroachment of government and satra (neo-Vaishnavite monastery) lands, AASU president Utpal Sarma, however, stated that the landless deserved land as per existing norms.
Samujjal Bhattacharya, chief advisor to AASU and North East Students’ Organisation (NESO), said AASU would approach the Supreme Court seeking the re-verification of documents of the applicants of National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. Over 19.06 lakh of the 3.3 crore applicants were left out of the NRC.
“At the same time, NESO demands an NRC for the whole of the Northeast,” Bhattacharya further stated, insisting that the detection and deportation of illegal Bangladeshi migrants should continue.