Dholpur, India — Ahmad Ali watched helplessly as the police set his home on fire.
They swarmed into his village, wielding sticks, to beat up participants in what local residents described as a peaceful protest against forced evictions. When the protesters fought back, they opened fire, killing two people, including a 12-year-old boy. Then the police began burning local homes and the possessions inside: a bed, a quilt, hay for feeding their cattle.
“Please see!” said Mr. Ali in a video of the incident, speaking to a national and world audience. “Are we lying?”
Videos and descriptions of the violence shocked much of India after they went viral last month and drew world attention to a government campaign of forced evictions in a far northeastern corner of the country. Local government officials said they were targeting an exploding population of illegal
Ahmad Ali said he watched the police burn down his home last month.Credit…Karan Deep Singh/The New York Times
But interviews and a review of documents by The New York Times showed that many of the evicted residents were legal citizens of India with a right to live on the government-owned land. Instead, critics of the government say, the evictions appear to be part of a broader campaign by India’s ruling party against the country’s Muslim population.
“They want Muslims to live suppressed, under the mercy of the Hindus,” said Swapan Kumar Ghosh, vice president of a nonprofit working for the state’s displaced people.
Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have rallied their Hindu nationalist base in part by pressing initiatives that put the country’s more than 200 million Muslims at a disadvantage.
In December 2019, India passed an immigration law that fast tracked citizenship for undocumented migrants from nearby countries as long as they were Hindu or one of five other religions, but not Muslim. Party leaders in a number of Indian states have pushed laws to ban religious conversion through marriage, using a term — “love jihad” — that leaves little doubt whom the measures are aimed at.
Some of the toughest measures have focused on Assam, where about one-third of the population is Muslim. In the summer of 2019, a review of citizenship left more than two million of Assam’s 33 million people, many of them poor and Muslim, stateless.
Now, under Himanta Biswa Sarma, Mr. Modi’s top official in the state, the government has forcibly evicted hundreds or perhaps thousands of people whom they call suspected foreigners — a group that human rights groups and local residents say is predominantly Muslim. His government recently announced plans to redistribute land to the state’s Indigenous people. Party leaders are already asking Mr. Sarma to order more evictions and build more agricultural projects on inhabited land.
Assam officials and party leaders did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Sarma has denied that the evictions are anti-Muslim, saying they have the “support of the public.”
The campaign is taking place in a state famous for its lush green hills and tea gardens, and where many people consider themselves Assamese before identifying as Indian. Many of the local residents, who speak Assamese, have sometimes chafed under Indian rule, fueling a separatist movement. The New York Times
