Lingayats Of A Maharashtra Town Don't Have Burial Ground. So They Did This
Members of the Lingayat community in Maharashtra's Beed district alleged that they do not have a cremation ground for their dead. To put pressure on the government and press their demands, they brought a body to the municipal council office and staged a protest.
The incident happened in Beed's Ambajogai city.
The Lingayat community, a distinct socio-religious group, has long relied on a crematorium in the Barakhambi area. This sacred space has allegedly been encroached upon by the Archaeological Department, leaving no room for the community to carry out funerals.
On Sunday, the discontent boiled over. The body of a Lingayat community member was brought to the steps of the municipal council office in a protest. Scores of Lingayat community members joined in a sit-in, with chants and placards demanding immediate action.
Ambajogai is a town represented by Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Namita Mundada.
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Hindustan Times
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Scroll.in
5 hours ago
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Behind wave of Assam evictions, a hungry river, and a land policy loaded against Miya Muslims
'Twenty-five years ago, the Brahmaputra took away our home,' said 38-year-old Safiur Rahman Mondol. 'Now, the government has bulldozed it.' Over two decades ago, Mondol's home on a char, the temporary sandbar islands of Assam which are regularly swallowed by the Brahmaputra, was washed away. The family landed up 10 km away at Churuabakra village in Assam's Dhubri district. But last month, Mondol's home and that of 1,400 Muslim families of Bengali origin in the area were demolished to make way for a power project. 'My brother and I built the homes after working for the last 25 years. We have nothing left now.' The district authorities designated 300 bighas of land for the rehabilitation of the evicted people, according to a notice issued by the Chapar revenue circle officer. It also granted a one-time relief of Rs 50,000 for residents to transport their belongings. Mondol, however, said he did not receive the money, nor would he go to the low-lying riverine area allotted by the district administration. 'The river already destroyed us once. We won't go near it.' Thousands of families in Assam have been turned homeless in recent demolition drives. In seven drives carried out in the last 45 days alone, the Assam government demolished the homes of 5,333 families, a majority of whom are Bengali-origin Muslims, also called Miya Muslims. Like Mondol, many of these families had lost their homes earlier too – to floods and river erosion. The BJP's bulldozer regime Between 2016, when the Bharatiya Janata Party government came to power, and now, 15,270 families – the majority of them Muslim – have been evicted from government land, according to data provided by the state revenue and disaster management department. At least eight Muslims have been shot dead during evictions carried out since 2016. The pace of evictions picked up after Himanta Biswa Sarma became chief minister in 2021. In these five years, the government has evicted around 50,000 people from 160 sq km of government land. There is popular support for the evictions against Bengali-origin Muslims, a community that has long been viewed in Assam as 'illegal immigrants' occupying the land of the 'indigenous'. But observers, researchers and politicians told Scroll that vast numbers of evicted migrant cultivators are not a sign of 'illegal immigration'. Instead, their continued landlessness is a product of an ecological crisis compounded by political discrimination. Who is an encroacher? Land has always been scarce in Assam, as large chunks of the state are regularly washed away by the Brahmaputra and its many tributaries. That is among a set of reasons that has forced people of all communities – and not just the Bengali-origin Muslims vilified as Bangladeshis – to occupy government land. 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Barek pointed out that many people in Asudubi had applied under the Mission Basundhara scheme for settlement of land. 'But their applications were rejected on the ground that we are not indigenous people,' Barek said. 'This is unfair.'
Time of India
11 hours ago
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