Inside Assam's Civilisational War: The Untold Heroes Of Himanta's Land Reclamation Campaign

The morning mist still hung low over Paikan Reserve Forest when the bulldozers rolled in. It was barely past 6 am, and the silence of the forest was already giving way to the low thrum of engines, the sharp barks of orders and the gathering tension of confrontation.

A thin line of forest guards, some armed only with bamboo lathis, stood in formation with their backs straight and eyes wary. Behind them, a handful of police personnel adjusted their helmets and shields, bracing for the chaos that had come to define eviction mornings in Assam.

Within minutes, mobile phones were up. The first cries echoed across the beel: “Ei amader jamin! (This is our land)” A woman sat cross-legged in front of a bulldozer, screaming at a junior magistrate barely in her thirties. A young boy climbed onto a dome-shaped madrassa structure, waving a green flag and yelling at the assembled officials to leave.

Soon, the shouting turned to scuffles. Then came the viral clips. Edited footage, shared on WhatsApp and Twitter, was already morphing into headlines before the drive had ended.

By evening, news portals had declared their verdict: “Assam Police Fires on Poor Muslim Villagers,” “Children Rendered Homeless in Bulldozer State,” “Himanta’s Communal Land Grab.” Not a single report mentioned the reserve forest. Or the years of encroachment. Or the numerous eviction notices served and ignored. Or the elephant corridor slowly vanishing under illegal settlements.

Yet behind the headlines and hashtags, there is a frontline rarely acknowledged: the people enforcing the law—forest officers, constables, magistrates—tasked with doing what decades of governments had refused to touch. They are abused, threatened, recorded and ridiculed. Many are indigenous. Some are Muslim. All operate in a grey zone where legality is overruled by emotion, and nationalism is mistaken for cruelty.

This is the story of those enforcers, the land they are reclaiming and the civilisational logic guiding a state that refuses to surrender. It is a story of tension, courage, backlash and a government determined to finish what others only dared begin.

The Ground Reality

To understand the fury and fallout of Assam’s eviction drives, one must begin with the land itself and who it belongs to, how it was taken and why the state is finally acting.

Take Paikan Reserve Forest, one of the most hotly contested sites of eviction. Official forest records classify this land under the Assam Forest Regulation of 1891, protected from cultivation or private habitation. Yet over the last three decades, large swathes were gradually cleared and built upon, first with bamboo and tarpaulin, then tin roofs, then concrete structures.

What began as grazing or seasonal cultivation soon became permanent habitation, aided by vote-seeking local politicians and a vast underground economy of land brokers, forged documents and communal networks.

It is a pattern repeated across western Assam, in the districts of Goalpara, Dhubri, Barpeta and the chars of the Brahmaputra. Reserved forests and wetlands like Hasila Beel have been encroached by settlers who claim helplessness, but often possess Aadhaar cards, ration entitlements, schools, tube wells and even access to electricity and mobile towers, all built on land that was never theirs.

The Assam government claims that since May 2021, it has cleared encroachments from over 39,000 acres of government, forest and wetland land, affecting lakhs. In Hasila Beel, nearly 660 families were evicted in June 2025 alone. In Paikan, over 1080 families were evicted by mid-July. Some demolitions involved madrassas with questionable funding. Others included shops, religious structures and single-room homes with no registration.

Eviction notices, according to district authorities, were served multiple times, some as early as 2018 while others under court orders in 2021–22. Warning signs, public announcements and final notices were issued before the bulldozers arrived. But most were ignored. Instead, resistance was organised. Settlers gathered in large groups. Local activists and communal leaders rallied the media. Children were placed in the front. The state was dared to act.

Still, the legal is no match for the emotional in the public eye. The image of a crying woman or a bulldozer demolishing a mosque becomes viral in seconds. The explanation of years of warnings, illegality and forest destruction takes too long to scroll through.

What’s more, many of the affected areas do not house Assamese-speaking populations. In zones like Bhalukdubi, Chirakuta, Charuwa-Bakhra and parts of Dhubri, the dominant language is Bengali, the culture tied to East Bengal and the networks often transnational. These are not mere impoverished villagers displaced by floods or hardship. In many cases, they are part of organised encroachment rings backed by political intermediaries, radical Muslim religious leaders and land mafia operatives who make crores selling land that legally does not belong to them.

The eviction drives, therefore, are not just administrative exercises. They are attempts to restore ecological balance, uphold sovereignty and prevent a repeat of the demographic takeover that has gripped Assam.

But in doing so, the state has placed an impossible burden on its lowest-rung personnel: the forest guard, the police constable and the junior magistrate. They stand between bulldozers and media mobs, between due process and communal spin, between a government’s resolve and a nation’s forgetfulness.

We turn to these very enforcers, those who risk their safety and reputation daily to uphold the law in the most contested corners of India.

The Human Side of the Bulldozer State

In the theatre of Assam’s eviction drives, the most visible agents of the state are its least powerful. Forest guards with cracked boots and borrowed shields. Police constables deployed far from home. Magistrates barely in their late twenties, trying to read land records while cameras roll and crowds jeer.

These are the frontline enforcers of the so-called Bulldozer State who are tasked not just with executing policy, but with absorbing its political and psychological costs.

Lakhan Rabha (name changed), a forest guard in Goalpara, has patrolled the edges of Paikan Reserve Forest for over 14 years. He is lean, weathered and speaks in quiet Assamese in a Rabha accent. On the morning of 24 July, after a particularly violent day of evictions, he sits on an overturned tree stump, sipping lukewarm tea from a steel tumbler.

“They call us devils,” he says. “I have been called a murderer. My photo was shared on Facebook and WhatsApp with lies written over it. But no one sees how we bleed.”

During the Paikan drive, Lakhan and his team were pelted with stones by a crowd that had refused to vacate even after multiple warnings. His colleague sustained a head injury. One bulldozer was attacked with petrol bombs. Yet the videos that went viral only showed the retaliation.

“I’m not asking to be thanked,” he says, “but at least tell the truth.”

He remembers planting saplings in the forest as a young recruit.

“Now there are houses with dish antennas where elephant calves used to play,” he says bitterly. “We’re not evicting people. We’re saving a forest.”

DSP Abdul Majid (name changed) is posted in western Assam. A practising Assamese Muslim from lower Assam himself, he has led multiple eviction operations under the Himanta Biswa Sarma government. He has seen the communal accusations up close and finds them both lazy and dangerous.

“Every time we remove illegal structures, I am told I’m a traitor to my community,” he says. “They don’t care that I’m enforcing a court order. They don’t care that the encroachments are illegal. If it’s a Muslim family, it becomes a story. If it’s a forest, it becomes ‘ancestral land.’”

Majid has worked alongside Hindu, tribal and even Christian officers, all part of eviction teams.

“The media paints us all with a single brush: BJP tools. But we’re the ones on the ground, facing mobs, petrol bombs, lawsuits. It’s easy to talk from Guwahati or Delhi. Try walking into a hostile settlement with just a radio and a helmet.”

In July, a video went viral. It showed a young female magistrate, flanked by police, being screamed at by a woman about how Allah will have his revenge. What the clip did not show was that she had already served three final notices to the family over the previous two weeks.

“I was branded an RSS agent on social media,” she says. “My father, who is a retired schoolteacher, received abusive calls. They found my Facebook account and began threatening my younger brother.”

She recounts the emotional stress.

“I didn’t join the civil services to oversee demolitions. But when I saw what had been built on the beel (wetland), I understood this wasn’t a mistake. It was a business.”

“It’s painful, but necessary. You cannot allow the law to be broken just because the violator cries louder.”

The most underappreciated aspect of the eviction operations is the teamwork between departments: forest officials, district police and local revenue officers.

Unlike the bureaucracies of other parts of the country such as West Bengal, Assam’s enforcement machinery under CM Sarma has developed an agile, responsive system that values resolve over red tape.

A local OC (officer-in-charge) in Dhubri, requesting anonymity, describes it as a bond forged in fire.

“Once the eviction notice is out, we move as one. We check coordinates, plan exit routes, set up medical tents and keep ambulances on standby. There’s no time to debate ideology when 300 people are ready to storm your bulldozer.”

He recalls one operation in early 2024 when they found AK-47 shells in a madrassa compound near a wetland.

“That didn’t make headlines,” he says. “Instead, we were accused of communal profiling.”

No one denies that evictions are traumatic. Even the most hardened officers admit that children crying during demolitions pierce through their stoicism. But many also express quiet fury at how their moral conflict is weaponised by the media.

"There is no joy in pulling down a roof," says a Circle Officer from Barpeta. "But ask yourself: if the land is protected, if no one has a legal deed, if the forest is dying, what choice do we have?"

He pauses. "We're told to be humane. But is it humane to let people destroy a wetland for votes? Is it secular to let only one community bend the law?"

Amid the threats and protests, there are quiet moments of affirmation. After the Hasila Beel drive, a group of Rabha villagers came to the local police station and thanked the officers. "They brought vegetables and rice," says a constable. "One elder told us, 'You did what we couldn't for 20 years.'"

These are the faces of the Bulldozer State. Not tyrants or zealots but foot soldiers of legality, ecology and, most importantly, survival. They are far from perfect. But they operate in zones where every action is politicised, every hesitation is weaponised and every eviction is a test of a nation's will to defend its land.

'This Is Not Just Land, It's Survival'

The state's bulldozers may draw the cameras, but it is the silence of Assam's indigenous people that defines the emotional landscape of the eviction debate. For decades, they have watched as government apathy, illegal migration and organised encroachment altered the demographics of their ancestral homelands. Now, as the state finally acts, their support comes not from hate but from heartbreak.

I set out to present their voices, not as footnotes to policy, but as the original stakeholders whose very existence is tethered to the land.

On the fringes of Sipajhar, where one of the most widely reported eviction drives took place in 2021, sits a nearly vanished Bodo hamlet. Of the 37 families who lived there in the 1980s, only 8 remain.

Eighty-year-old Bhaben Basumatary remembers walking barefoot through mustard fields to school, playing near the river that now barely exists. "The others left," he says flatly. "Not because they sold the land. Because they were threatened, outnumbered and made to feel like strangers."

When asked whether the eviction drive brought him relief, he says: "Relief? No. But justice, yes. For years, they built mosques, markets and madrassas on grazing grounds. They even renamed our river paths. Now at least someone is listening."

In Batadrava, the birthplace of Srimanta Sankardev and a sacred site for Assamese Vaishnavites, land is a living memory and its erosion, both physical and cultural, is real. Over the past 30 years, indigenous Assamese families have lost both farmland and cultural sites to systematic encroachment.

"I'm not against any community," says Mrigen Goswami, an Assamese teacher who has seen the rampant encroachment by Bengali-speaking Muslims. "But when they came, they didn't just build homes. They changed everything: language, festivals, even the names of birds."

Goswami says many in his village were scared to complain. "Political leaders came for votes. Local Congress MLAs gave government benefits to Muslims. If we protested, we were told we're anti-minority." Now, with the government acting, he sees a shift. "For the first time, I feel the state is on our side. It's late. But better than never."

He walks to the edge of a paddy field and points to a cluster of bulldozed structures. "They will build again if we are not vigilant. But for now, the land breathes again."

In the chars (riverine islands) of Dhubri, where communities like the Koch-Rajbongshis, Deshis (indigenous Muslims) and other native fisherfolk once thrived, demographic change has led to growing ethnic marginalisation.

Fisherman Ramesh Koch is bitter but composed. "My grandfather fished here when this was all forest. He had a boat, three cows and six acres. Today, I have half a boat, no cows, and I pay a 'tax' to illegal settlers to access my own river."

What kind of tax?

"They call it 'donation' for the madrassa," he shrugs. "If we don't pay, our nets are cut. Who do we complain to? The gaonburah (village headman) is one of them."

Ramesh's account is not isolated. Across multiple chars, a pattern emerges: illegal settlers, backed by political networks, enforcing shadow governance in areas the state had long abandoned. The eviction drives, he says, are a form of civilisational correction.

"We're not against anyone living peacefully. But this is not peaceful. This is demographic conquest."

Purnima Lalung, part of a local cooperative, remembers the day a madrassa was built on the edge of their community fishing pond. "We protested. They said they had permission. But we checked. There was no land record, no clearance. They just built it and waited for a politician to arrive."

After the 2023 eviction drive in her area, Purnima led a group of women who began cleaning the beel and replanting aquatic vegetables. "We've seen our culture die in slow motion. The beels were filled with debris and our fishes were killed. Now we are reclaiming not just land but our rights to our land."

Despite their quiet support for the drives, many indigenous Assamese remain reluctant to speak on record. The fear of being labelled 'xenophobic', 'RSS stooges' or 'Hindutva agents' is real. Several tribal elders and Assamese Hindu leaders requested anonymity even when recounting personal trauma.

One Dimasa elder in Hojai, who once lost a temple pond to encroachers, says bluntly: "The NGO wallahs will call you fascist. The Delhi press will call you genocidal. We just want our fields back."

This silence, however, has begun to crack. The new narrative led by Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, framing eviction not as hate but as historical correction and ecological justice, has emboldened more people to speak.

It is impossible to talk about indigenous anxiety without acknowledging the demographic shifts that have occurred. The H.S. Brahma Committee and Upamanyu Hazarika Commission clearly states that districts like Dhubri, Goalpara, Barpeta and South Salmara have seen a dramatic increase in Bengali-speaking Muslim populations, often at the cost of land owned by indigenous tribes and Hindu peasants.

This has led to a unique civilisational anxiety: not just about territory, but about identity, language and continuity.

A young Assamese activist from the All Assam Students' Union (AASU) in Dhekiajuli puts it succinctly: "Our people were displaced without war. Now the state is finally doing what it should have done decades ago. If that makes us bulldozer nationalists, so be it."

For Assam's indigenous communities, eviction is not vengeance, it is a form of mourning. A mourning for rivers renamed, hills razed, temples defaced, festivals mocked and children raised with no memory of land ownership. It is also, perhaps, a small glimpse of closure.

The Himanta Doctrine

In much of India, bulldozers are symbols of muscle. But in Assam, under Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, the bulldozer has taken on a civilisational character. It is not just an instrument of demolition, it is a message of justice and reclamation.

Sarma has often repeated: "Encroachment is not poverty, it is politics." And it is this political project that the Assam government seeks to reverse. At its core lies a doctrine that marries governance with cultural memory, law with identity and administration with civilisational assertion.

One: Not Just Land, But Legacy

To many observers, evicting a few thousand settlers may seem harsh. But Sarma's narrative is not about numbers, it is about narratives. "Where is Batadrava in the public memory?" he asked during a press briefing in early 2021. "Why did we allow the birthplace of Sankardev to be surrounded by illegal settlements? Why did we wait 40 years?"

From Batadrava to Lumding, from Dhalpur to Barpeta, each site cleared is not just land reclaimed, it is civilisation reasserted. The bulldozers move not only through illegal structures but through layers of state apathy and elite cowardice that allowed Assam's frontiers to become fluid.

Two: The State Will Not Be Neutral Anymore

In his first term as Chief Minister, Sarma has discarded the language of "neutrality" that shackled earlier administrations. "The Assamese state will protect its land, forests, rivers and civilisation. We are not here to pretend," he declared. This unapologetic shift from passive governance to proactive guardianship has unsettled many.

The eviction drives, in this view, are not ad hoc operations, they are part of a larger cultural reorientation. It is why madrassas with foreign links were demolished. It is why government schools are now required to raise the national flag. It is why encroached wetlands are being cleared and revived under schemes that name ancient tirthas/sattras and indigenous heroes.

Sarma's team doesn't shy away from calling this a civilisational project. "This is not anti-minority. It is pro-Assam," says an official in the Chief Minister's Office. "For too long, the Assamese people were told to keep quiet. That they have no right to demand control over their own land. That era is over."

Three: No More Selective Sympathy

A key shift in the Himanta Doctrine is the refusal to play the media's guilt game. Most governments would crumble at the first viral video of a crying child or a demolished tin house. But Sarma's government has chosen to narrate the other side, the story of the displaced indigenous farmer, the violated wetland, the radicalised madrassa, the landless constable.

At press conferences, the Chief Minister reads from forest records, court orders and satellite images. He cites ancient sattras, not just vote shares. And in doing so, he replaces moral defensiveness with cultural confidence.

Four: The War Against Land Jihad

Sarma's response has been precise and legal. Unlike the emotional sloganeering of the past, his approach has focused on law, documents, satellite data and administrative will. But make no mistake: the bulldozers are not just clearing land, they are redrawing the boundaries of belonging.

Five: Civilisational Governance Is Here to Stay

The Himanta Doctrine is not a fleeting phase. It is a blueprint for a new kind of Indian governance, one that does not apologise for protecting its civilisation. One that asserts its priorities without waiting for Delhi's approval. One that merges the legitimacy of the state with the soul of the nation.

Critics will call it communal. But the facts are harder to dismiss: wetlands are reviving, sattras are being secured, forests are regaining boundaries and indigenous voices, once marginalised, are finally being heard.

The bulldozer, in this doctrine, is not fascism. It is firewall and foundation. It protects what must not be lost and clears what was imposed without consent.

But what happens next? Can this momentum be sustained? Or will it, too, fall to the slow pressures of appeasement and fatigue?

The Roadblocks to a Restored Assam

For all the determination of the Himanta administration, the road ahead is anything but smooth. While bulldozers clear structures, the battle for land is not just on the ground. It's being fought in courtrooms, media studios, WhatsApp forwards and international forums. And behind every eviction lies a network of resistance which is legal, political, religious and ideological.

The question now is: Can the Assamese state sustain its momentum against a system built to resist it?

One of the major roadblocks to eviction drives is the legal ecosystem that allows well-funded groups to stall or reverse state action. PILs, stay orders, humanitarian appeals, many coordinated by activist NGOs and political fronts, have already begun to choke the pace of clearances. The Congress legal cell and SFI legal activists from Kerala are working tirelessly in local courts to protect the encroachers.

A forest officer in Barpeta puts it bluntly: "We follow the rules, issue notices, conduct surveys and just when we act, someone shows up in court saying their 'fundamental rights' are being violated."

In recent months, the Gauhati High Court has had to step in multiple times, sometimes backing the state, sometimes cautioning it. But every delay, every ambiguity, allows illegal settlements to regroup, rebuild and rearm the narrative of victimhood.

If the bulldozer is the tool of the state, the headline is the weapon of the encroacher.

Within minutes of every eviction, national and international media run emotionally charged visuals: sobbing children, wailing women, smoke rising from the ruins of homes. Rarely are land documents shown. Rarely are the faces of forest guards or displaced Assamese tribals featured. Rarely is the truth of long-term encroachment, violence against officials or environmental damage mentioned.

Hit jobs by international wire agencies claim "Muslim villagers forcibly removed by Hindu nationalist state forces," completely ignoring the fact that Muslim officers led the operation, tribal guards enforced it and court orders backed it.

This weaponisation of perception is arguably the biggest challenge to Assam's statecraft. Even when the facts are on the side of the law, optics are being engineered to portray civilisational correction as communal cruelty.

Assam's eviction drives do not occur in isolation. They intersect with broader geopolitical currents, especially as many of the illegal settlers are believed to have roots in Bangladesh, and in some cases, connections to radical transnational Islamic networks.

Activists with ties to global Islamic organisations, international human rights bodies and foreign actors have begun raising concerns sometimes quietly, sometimes through platforms like UNHRC.

These pressures will only intensify as elections approach.

Eviction drives are physically taxing, emotionally charged and politically risky. Forest staff, junior magistrates and local police operate with minimal protection, low budgets and enormous scrutiny.

One young magistrate from Barpeta confesses, "After the third drive, I began to fear for my family. My phone number was leaked. My mother stopped going to the market."

Unless the state continues to shield, incentivise and publicly support its enforcers, bureaucratic will may begin to crack. The memory of earlier governments, where eviction notices were quietly ignored and politically inconvenient drives shelved, is still fresh in many departments.

Perhaps the most serious long-term threat is political. What happens if a future government decides to reverse course? Will the encroachers return, aided by new ration cards, voter lists, and promises of amnesty?

This is a fear many indigenous Assamese express in hushed tones. "It took Himanta to undo what Tarun Gogoi and Congress did for thirty years," says a retired teacher in Darrang. "But what if tomorrow another Gogoi comes (a jibe at Gaurav Gogoi and Akhil Gogoi who sympathised with encroachers)? Will we lose everything again?"

The only insurance against this is institutionalisation. Turn eviction into policy, not campaign. Legal reforms. Clear maps. Protected zones. Community vigilance. Remember, nearly 21,00,000 acres still remain under encroachment.

But despite the roadblocks, something irreversible has begun. The state is no longer neutral. The citizen is no longer afraid to speak. The idea of Assam is no longer just a cultural memory but a living, assertive political force.

The bulldozer may be loud, but what is louder is the silent confidence growing in villages, forests and border towns: that Assam will no longer bend, no longer apologise and no longer surrender what is rightfully its own.

A Just Bulldozer is Better than a Silent State

In the middle of a chaotic eviction drive in Dhalpur a few years ago, as crowds grew hostile and cameras flashed, a senior police officer reportedly murmured to a colleague, "We are not just removing houses. We are reclaiming the future."

This framing makes many uncomfortable. Isn't it dangerous, they argue, to spiritualise the state's use of force?

But such objections forget that the moral vocabulary of India has always drawn upon a civilisational sense of justice, not Western abstractions. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is instructed by Krishna to pick up arms not out of hatred, but because dharma demands action, even when painful.

Assam today is that Kurukshetra, where action postponed has become suffering prolonged.

Encroachments didn't happen overnight. They happened over decades, allowed by appeasement politics, bureaucratic paralysis and demographic aggression. The bulldozer enters only when every other arm of the state has failed.

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has embraced this moral clarity unapologetically. He does not hide behind bureaucratic language. He speaks in the civilisational idiom, with references to culture, identity and historical memory. His use of the word "civilisational fight" isn't rhetoric but policy direction.

Under his tenure, eviction is not a sporadic event. It is a long-term strategy: part of a broader war for the cultural and demographic integrity of Assam.

In speeches, Sarma often quotes scripture, mythology or history, invoking Lachit Borphukan, Sankardev or Krishna himself. His critics call it dangerous. But to many Assamese, it is finally a language that speaks to their soul, not just their sense of security.

This is Assam's silent frontline.

They may not speak in panels or write op-eds. But they carry lathis, GIS maps and old land records. And with every eviction, they recover more than just land. They recover memory, sovereignty and the sacred promise of justice.

And in that reclamation lies not just Assam's future but its honour.