How Assam Is Fighting Back In The 1,000-Year Demographic War Against India
Using a 1950 law, Assam has so far cleared more than 42,000 acres of encroached land and reportedly pushed back thousands of illegal Bangladesh and Rohingya infiltrators.
In perhaps the bluntest way possible for any politician, Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has made Assam a test case in countering the 1,000-year demographic war against India and over 100 years of spontaneous influx and targeted takeover of his state.
Using a 1950 law, the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, the state government has so far cleared more than 42,000 acres (think 32,000 international-size football grounds) of encroached land and reportedly pushed back thousands of illegal Bangladesh and Rohingya infiltrators across the border. The Sarma's government is now planning to launch another major eviction drive in Golaghat to clear approximately 3,300 acres of land in the Rengma reserve forest at Assam's Uriamghat, bordering Nagaland.
These came alongside Himanta Biswa Sarma's public statement that the Muslim population in the state had surged to 40 per cent now from 12 per cent in 1951.
The drive has given voice to local marginalised tribes. Thousands of them gathered in Dhemaji district, Assam, carrying fire-torches and raising slogans of 'Bangladeshis go back". Demonstrators issued a 15-day ultimatum to illegal settlers in the forest to vacate the region, warning of consequences if the demands are not met.
Assam, the rest of Northeast, West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Bihar have long been part of Al Qaeda and other Islamists' plan to create a greater Bangladesh and complete the green arc from sub-Saharan Africa to the Gulf to Af-Pak to central Asia, Kashmir and downwards. Rampant demographic takeover, Indian official slumber, and liberal whitewash of the threat have made things easy for the Islamists.
But Sarma's counterattack should be a reminder of Assam's centuries-old glorious tradition of standing unconquered against invaders.
Only after a decade of the Narendra Modi government at the Centre, the world is coming to know about Lachit Barphukan, Assam's iconic commander who had defeated the Mughal army in the Battle of Saraighat on the waters of Brahmaputra in March 1671.
Even before that, Qutb ud-Din Aibak, soon after conquering Delhi, had dispatched Ikhtiyar al-Din Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khilji on a mission to central and eastern India.
'After conquering Bihar and Bengal in 1203 AD, Khilji headed for Assam. But such was the counter-attack by the Kamrup (Assam) king Viswasundardeva that Bakhtiyar Khilji somehow managed to get back to Bengal after his entire army was literally wiped out on the banks of the Brahmaputra. The Kamrup king's victory over the first-ever Muslim invaders of Assam has been recorded in a rock inscription at Kanai-Barasi-Bowa near Guwahati," writes veteran journalist Samudra Gupta Kashyap, who has recently authored a book titled, Assam's Great Heroes Who Fought the Muslim Invasions.
It also mentions the heroism of kings and chiefs like Indra Narayan, Chakradhwaj, Nilambar, Chilarai, Indrapratap Narayan, Parikshit, Sonatan, Balinarayan, Madhusudan, Parasuram, Jadu Nayak, Susengpha, Momai-Tamuli Barbarua, Tangchu Sandikui and several others who had vanquished invaders who had superior firepower.
Today, Sarma claims that land more than the area of Chandigarh has been freed from encroachers in Assam, and much more action is coming up. Assam could be the test case for the rest of Bharat, especially West Bengal, where demographic change encouraged by the ruling TMC could some day bring the state to the brink of a third, bloody Partition.
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