New Delhi, Aug. 30 -- Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Tuesday (August 26) said that ''shoot-at-sight orders'' at night, enforced since June 13 in Dhubri following communal disturbances in the district, will continue during Durga Puja. People of Sanatan Dharma are in a minority in Dhubri, and their protection from fundamentalists is a priority of the government, Sarma said.
Assam is on the verge of another civil war. An urgent public tribunal convened by the Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR) has sounded the alarm on what it described as "systematic state-backed human rights violations and blood curdling cruelty" against the Bengali Muslim community in Assam, warning that the region is sliding into a constitutional crisis. Women and infants are left in no-man's land while detention centres jail the poor for years without justice. It is reported that the Chief Minister is spearheading an aggressive eviction drive to reclaim government and forest lands from suspected illegal encroachers. The eviction campaign has freed over 1.5 lakh bigha of land since 2021. Opposition alleges communal bias, political polarisation and collusion with industrialists behind such a large scale eviction. The Supreme Court bench in its August 22 order has granted interim stay on this massive eviction drive by the Assam government.
On Wednesday (August 27) the Assam CM has issued a list of Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) relating to land transfer. The Assam government will now scrutinise land transfers between persons of different faiths. "If the proposal is received from buyers and sellers of the same religion, the SOP will not be applicable to them. But in the case of those from different religions, all these factors will be strictly scrutinised", the CM warned. Anticipating backlash from the evicted persons, the Assam Cabinet approved a policy in May 2025 to issue arms licences to "original inhabitants and indigenous communities" living in vulnerable and border regions. It may be recalled that the Assam government notified a new land policy in 2019 which aimed at overhauling a three-decade old land law and promised to allocate land to landless indigenous people, but did not specify who was indigenous. Nonetheless, the then Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma clarified that an indigenous person could sell his or her land to an indigenous person only, not to anyone else. "That means our land will be preserved for our people," he asserted.
This SOP on land transfer echoes the infamous "Aryanisation" (in German, Arisierung) of the Nazi Germany which refers to the transfer of Jewish-owned property to non-Jews in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. It aimed to transfer Jewish-owned economic enterprises to "Aryan," that is, non-Jewish ownership. There were two distinct phases of "Aryanisation": from 1933 until summer 1938 (voluntary Aryanisation) and from fall 1938 until the collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945 (forced Aryanisation). On April 26, 1938, the "Decree for the Reporting of Jewish-Owned Property" issued by Hitler's government, took effect, requiring all Jews in both Germany and Austria to register any property or assets. The edict marked a turning point in the Nazi party's efforts to push Jews out of the German economy.
The new land law came at a time when nearly 1.9 million residents, mostly Muslim, were left off a citizen's register in Assam as part of a drive to detect and detain illegal immigrants. The apparatuses that have been instituted by the Assam government to mark people as illegal are threefold: the "doubtful voter (D-voter)" mechanism, reference cases, and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). All the detainees locked up in detention centres are the victims of the first two political apparatuses, which fundamentally target social groups with a historical connection with erstwhile East Bengal, writes EPW. The illegal immigrants face two options-either detention in a camp or deportation. By 2020, the largest detention centre of India was established in Goalpara's Matia village, 126 km from state capital Dispur. It can house 3,000 people.
Destiny of the 'Stateless People'
The Assam NRC of 1951 was updated to detect illegal immigrants and the entire process, carried out between 2014 and 2019, was monitored by the Supreme Court. The final NRC list, published in August 2019, found that 1.9 million of the 33 million applicants in the state were not eligible for Indian citizenship. Ironically, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told India Today NE on December 14, 2022 that the NRC list was erroneous. He categorically blamed then NRC state co-ordinator Prateek Hajela, an IAS officer, for the anomalies. Out of these 1.9 million, 500,000 were Hindu Bengalis. In April 2024, the Assam CM promised that the issue of 'Doubtful' (D) voters among Bengali-Hindus of the state would be resolved in six months after the Lok Sabha elections.
It appears that the Assam government has developed a blueprint to utilise the illegal immigrants as prison labourers. Last Monday (August 25), the Assam government issued a notification outlining guidelines for awarding community service as punishment to persons convicted of certain crimes under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS). According to the notification issued by the Political (A) Department, courts may direct convicts to serve in various departments and institutions, reports the Assam Tribune.
Prior to this announcement, the Assam government has launched SRIJAN - Sustainable Rehabilitation of Inmates in Jails of Assam (New) with an objective of making Assam Jails as a correctional home. It has introduced a new skill development program to skill inmates for establishing prison industry to support prisoners' rehabilitation and livelihood support. Branding and marketing of prison goods to enhance demand and supply to increase revenue is one of the stated objectives of SRIJAN. Many of the large global firms like KRUPP, Mayer, BMW, SCHNEIDER et al immensely used Jew prisoners during Nazi period.
Significantly, the two-time former Chief Minister, Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, who led the Assam movement against Bangladeshi immigrants and was one of the signatories of Assam Accord in 1985, while voicing his strong opposition against the amended Citizenship Act, suspected India was moving in the same direction as that of "Hitler's Nazi Germany", reports the Business standard. The inhuman and unconstitutional actions by the Assam government, against the religious and linguistic minorities of Assam, indicate that tendency.
The writer is a professor of Business Administration who primarily writes on political economy, global trade, and sustainable development.Views expressed are personal
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.