Congress MP Pradyut Bordoloi from Morigaon said the government is punishing Muslims for not voting for the BJP.
Team Clarion
NEW DELHI – Homes owned by about 8,000 Muslims were selectively razed while those belonging to Hindus at the same place were left untouched in a demolition drive by the district administration last month in Assam’s Morigaon district.
On June 24, 1, 500 families living in the Silbhaga village for four decades were evicted alleging that they had encroached the railway land, media reports reaching here said on Monday.
“We have been living here for three generations. My maternal grandfather lived here. My mother was born in this house. My brothers and I were living here. But now we don’t have any land or place to go,” Mamuni Begum, a victim who is now living in a makeshift tarpaulin home, was quoted by Scroll as saying.
A few hundred metres from Mamoni’s house, a cluster of houses, a school, a temple and an ashram remain untouched amid the debris of other buildings.
A resident pointed at some homes in the area and said: “Those are the residences of Hindu families. But they are still standing. The temple and the ashram are also on railway land. Why were they not pulled down?”
Several other residents of the settlement also pointed out that Bengal-origin Muslim families were singled out. Almost all of the houses razed belonged to Muslim families, they said.
According to the report, a Kali temple still remains on the land whereas houses adjoining it have been brought down. “They flattened the decades-old madrasa and broke the masjid wall but did not touch the Kali Mandir and the ashram,” said 52-year-old Abul Kashem, a resident whose house was lay demolished nearby. However, another madrasa and two masjids remain standing.
Residents feel that their houses were demolished because of their Muslims identity. “Why does the Assam government deprive and abuse us? Is it because we are Muslims?” asked Munawara Begum, a physically challenged woman.
According to Muslim residents, notices were pasted on several sheds, homes and trees on June 14. However, the Hindu residents of the settlement said no notices were pasted on their homes.
They said other than the Bengal-origin Muslims, close to 80 Hindu families live on the eastern side of the settlement. Similarly, there are 40-odd Hindu homes near the Shankardev Vidya Niketan School and 60-odd families on the western side near the quarry.
Morigaon Deputy Commissioner Devashish Sharma said: “It is railway land according to land records and the railway track is proof of that. We had orders to clear the land. We could have just started immediately. But we made several announcements from 9 am to 1 pm, asking residents to dismantle the houses themselves. When we saw that some people were adamant, we started demolishing the homes around 1 pm.”
Asked about allegations of bias, the official said they could not demolish the houses belonging to the majority community in certain portions because before we could reach there, the high court order came and we had to stop it.”
Residents also pointed out that the administration continued to demolish their houses for hours even though Gauhati High Court stayed the demolition drive. Sharma insisted that the drive will be stopped only when the hard copy of the order was received.
Anajli Das, an elderly woman of the village, said that several of the evicted Bengal-origin Muslims had arrived at the settlement 40 years ago. “The government should have given some more time to relocate them. Where will these poor people go? There was no alternative given. Nobody has the capacity to buy land.”
Many of these families had migrated from areas close to the Brahmaputra in Morigaon and Nagaon districts after losing their homes to floods and land erosion and settled on the slopes and in the foothills of the Silbhanga hill.
“After the river broke us, we built a temporary house on the abandoned and useless railway land on the slopes of Silbhanga hill,” said Julhas Ali Ahmed, another resident of the village. “We lived here for about 40 years.”
Congress MP Pradyut Bordoloi from Morigaon said that the BJP government is punishing Muslims for not voting for the party.
“The Morigaon district administration in my constituency at #Jagiroad has demolished a Muslim settlement called #Silbhangga in the last few days because these people apparently did not vote for the regime,” said Bordoloi.