ARSHAD AHMED
“You cannot go in. It is too risky.”
Sonapur residents told me this as I waited along National Highway 37 on the morning of 13 September, feeling nervous and confused.
I was nervous because I had never seen such a long convoy of about 500-600 armed police personnel entering the village I was going to visit, and confused because I was stuck with two options: either I head back home—another four-hour journey—or I muster up the courage to venture into the village somehow to see what happened the night before.
On 12 September, the Assam police opened fire at residents in Kachutali, a remote village on the foothills of Nizarapara Hill in Kamrup (Metro) district, some 30 km from Assam’s capital, Guwahati.
Police had to use force to prevent damage to the lives of policemen and officials after they were attacked with stones, swords, and bamboo, GP Singh, director general of Assam police, said.
Two were shot dead—19-year-old Haidar Ali and 18-year-old Jubahir Ali—and 35 others, including residents and government officials, comprising police personnel, were injured in the clashes.
As I chose to visit the village, I found contrasting tales of what happened.
The locals in Kachutali 1 told me they were stacking their belongings, including foodgrains out in the open “as we had nowhere else to go” after their homes were demolished in an ongoing eviction drive first carried out on 9 September.
These families, the district administration said, were encroaching on the government in a “tribal belt”, which is reserved for certain communities from the scheduled tribes.
Over the next three days, the Kamrup (Metro) district administration evicted 150-odd Bengali Muslim families and demolished 237 structures.
On the morning of 12 September, the police not only destroyed their foodgrains but also dismantled a makeshift shed under which children were having their meals, leading to charged reactions from the residents, according to eyewitnesses.
“If the police attacked your children while they were eating in peace,” said a woman from Kachutali. “You will not sit quiet, will you?”
They told me they had collectively stormed out in protest, following which the firing began by the police. “The police just kept the trigger running,” they said. “They did not care whether they were children or women.”
On the same day, while navigating through homes reduced to rubble in the village, I heard a mother's wailing scream in Kachutali 1.
“It was Tafish Ali’s mother,” a resident said.
Tafish Ali, 19, was shot at by the police the night before and was battling death in the Guwahati Medical College.
For the next five hours that I was in the village, meeting victims and displaced families, that scream followed me, whipping up the simmering rage within me for what I saw: screams from every household, people in tears sitting by the debris of their homes, and young men tirelessly explaining to media why they should not be called “Bangladeshis”.
It came to a tipping point when I met Haidar Ali’s family in the village. His mother, Sharabanu Khatun, collapsed in my arms as I sat by her, and Maqbul Ali, his father, was inconsolable about his death.
“Could they not have shown mercy for my son,” said Maqbul Ali. “It is easy to kill a miya.”
Miya is a derogatory term used for the Bengali Muslims in the state.
Eviction drives under the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Assam government have become violent on three occasions, including the recent one in Kachutali. The state police, in two previous eviction drives, opened fire at protesting residents (here and here).
In both of these cases, like Kachutali, the victims, including those shot dead, were Bengali Muslims.
Minority Bengali Muslims have accused the Assamese Hindu Nationalist BJP-led government of weaponising eviction to target the community.
The state’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, has recently ramped up vitriolic attacks on the community, leading to their further vilification in the state.
The state also demolished nearly 340 homes over two days on 25 and 26 September despite the Supreme Court's stay on nationwide demolition drives on 17 September.
You can read Arshad Ahmed’s full report here
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