Assam: Homes of 1,080 families bulldozed in Goalpara eviction drive
This was the second major eviction drive in the district. On June 16, the authorities demolished homes of 690 families in Hasilabeel, a wetland, near Goalpara town.
At least five eviction drives have been carried out in four districts of Assam in the past month, which displaced nearly 3,500 families.
Goalpara Divisional Forest Officer Tejas Mariswamy told Scroll that 2,700 structures were demolished on Saturday.
'The land is part of the Paikan Reserve Forest of the Krishnai Range,' Mariswamy said.
Mizanur Rahman, a 28-year-old resident of Bidyapara revenue village, lost his homes during the eviction drive.
He and eight members of his family have nowhere to go, Rahman said. 'All of the three houses including the pacca house were razed today…we don't have land anywhere else,' he said.
'People have been living here before it was declared a reserved forest,' said Rahman. 'It is a revenue village.'
The Assam government had proposed to constitute Paikan as a reserve forest in 1959. It was declared a reserve forest in 1982.
In 2022, the Goalpara Lawyers Association sent a memorandum to the state government and forest department saying that the forest rights and claims of several persons over the land in the area had not been settled.
The association had asked 'for compliance of the mandatory provisions' under 1891 Assam Forest Regulation as decided in October 1959, before the evictions take place in the protected forest areas.
Jiten Das, the president of the district lawyers' association, and Wazed Ali, the secretary of the body, said that in the past 40 years, 472 villages of Goalpara district had been washed away because of erosion caused by the Brahmaputra river.
As a result, they said, thousands of people had become homeless and landless. 'Many of these people, having found no alternative for their survival, took shelter in the PRF land, erecting a shed over their head,' they added.
A large number of security personnel had been deployed for patrolling in the areas in the past few days.
District officials had said that the majority of the people living in the area had already dismantled their homes and shifted out before the eviction drive took place.
Deputy Commissioner Khanindra Choudhury told Scroll that the evictions were carried out peacefully as more than 1,000 police personnel had been deployed. About 40 bulldozers were used, he said.
Last week in Dhubri district, where an eviction drive led to the demolition of the homes of 1,400 Bengali-origin Muslim families, the authorities had allocated land for the rehabilitation of the affected persons. The administration had also earmarked Rs 50,000 for one-time relief for residents to transport their belongings.
Ninety-three families of Bengali-origin Muslims were evicted on June 30 in Assam's Nalbari district during an anti-encroachment drive on nearly 150 acres of village grazing reserve land in the Barkhetri revenue circle.
On July 3, about 220 families were evicted during an anti-encroachment drive in upper Assam's Lakhimpur district. The district authorities said that the families were living on 77 acres of land at four locations, including three village grazing reserves.
Between 2016 and August 2024, more than 10,620 families – the majority of them Muslim – have been evicted from government land, according to data provided by the state revenue and disaster management department.
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He noted in his prison diary that it moved him to be so close to the barracks in which Lala Lajpat Rai was imprisoned, so close to the yard where Bhagat Singh and his companions, Sukhdev and Rajguru, were executed, so close to 'the famous well whose water Maharaja Ranjit Singh loved so much and which today [1942] serves the entire jail population'. I myself first heard of Yusuf Meherally in the early 1980s, when a friend worked at a centre for urban studies named for him. Some years later, I bought, in a New York bookshop, a collection of essays by the American journalist and historian, Bertram D Wolfe. The book was called Strange Communists I Have Known, and it had an essay on Meherally, intriguingly titled: 'Gandhi versus Lenin'. Wolfe and Meherally became friends in the mid 1930s, on the latter's first visit to the United States of America. 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In Hitler's jails or in Stalin's it would only have gotten me before a firing squad…If Gandhi had been in the Soviet Union, he would have disappeared forever from view after his first word of protest. The English at least at least felt that they had to report his defiance, even while they ridiculed it and imprisoned him. That is why he taught us to hate the evil things the English did but not to hate the English or ever despair of their regeneration or our own.' In his introduction to Madhu Dandavate's biography, Meherally's former colleague in the Congress Socialist Party, Achyut Patwardhan, described him as 'a great Humanist. Not for him any narrow religious affiliation. He was nurtured on a deep love of India's past culture.' Meherally's lifelong quest for mitigating human suffering went alongside a keen interest in art and literature, as well as a precocious environmentalism. His friend, recalled Patwardhan, 'had stood entranced before the Himalayan range, and he had caught the secrets whispered by the vast skies to the ageless snow ranges where man had never set foot'. Elsewhere in the book, Dandavate quotes another old associate, the great socialist-feminist, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, as writing after Yusuf Meherally's death in July 1950: 'Fearless yet tender, daring yet considerate; ready for any sacrifice, yet full of love and affection, Meherally was unique among men. He claimed devoted friends and loyal comrades, cutting across politics and religion.' A third comrade, the trade union leader and Goan freedom-fighter, Peter Alvarez, said in his tribute in the Bombay assembly that Meherally 'was a mingled fire and honey whose only concern was every human interest except his own'. It was this selflessness, this absolute commitment to the welfare and happiness of others, that led Meherally to neglect his own health, hastening his early death. During his last illness, he was shifted to a well-known Bombay clinic, but when the treatment provided no relief, Meherally told Jayaprakash Narayan to take him back home so that he could die there since 'he did not want to spoil the good name of the doctors who attended on him.' In this manner, writes Dandavate, 'even at the last moment of his life, Yusuf's concern was for others'. His death brought together people from across the political spectrum, with conservative Congressmen walking side by side with radical socialists in the funeral procession. For Mumbai to have had a mayor who was born Muslim was once both commonplace and characteristic. Tragically, while London and New York have become more open-minded in recent decades, more welcoming of religious and linguistic diversity, Mumbai has turned more chauvinistic. It is hard to see how, or when, it will ever again elect a mayor like Yusuf Meherally, that socialist, scholar, patriot and internationalist, truly a man who ennobled his city, his country, and the world.
