Goalpara: Under a sea of blue canvas in a corner of the northeast of India, near Bangladesh, hundreds of Muslim men, women and babies take refuge after being evicted from their homes, in the last repression in Assam before the state elections.
They are among thousands of families whose houses have been razed in recent weeks by the authorities, the most intense action in decades, which accuse them of remaining illegally in government lands.
The demolitions in Assam, where the Hindu Nationalist Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi will seek re-election at the beginning of next year, coincided with a national repression against Bengali speaking Muslims of the brand “illegal infiltrators” of Bangladesh, from the displacement of a pr-india premier in Dhaka.
“The government harass us repeatedly,” said Aran Ali, 53, speaking outside a naked land patch in the Assam Goalpara district that has become the improvised home for his three family.
“We are accused of being invaders and foreigners,” said Ali, who was born in Assam, while Julio's abrasor hit the settlement.
Assam represents 262 km from the border of 4097 km duration of India with Bangladesh and has dealt for a long time with anti -immigrant feelings rooted in fear that Bengali migrants, both Hindus and Muslims, of the neighboring country overwhelm the local culture and economy.
The last clamp, under the party Bharatiya Janata de Modi, has been destined exclusively to the Muslims and led to protests that killed a teenager days ago.
The Prime Minister of the Assam Fire Marm, Himanta Biswa Sarma, who is among a series of ambitious BJP leaders accused of promoting religious discord to arouse populist feelings before surveys throughout the country, says “Muslim infiltrators of Bangladesh” threaten the identity of India. “
“We resist without fear of continuous Muslim infiltration and without control from the other side of the border, which has already caused an alarming demographic change,” he said recently in X.
“In several districts, Hindus are now about to become a minority in their own land.”
He told reporters last week that migrant Muslims represent 30% of the 31 million of the Assam's population from the 2011 census.
“In a few years from now on, Assam's minority population will be about 50%,” he said.
Sarma did not respond to a Reuters Request for comments.
OBJECTIVES FOR RIGHT GROUPS
The BJP has long believed that Hindu India is the natural homeland of all Hindus and implemented policies to counteract the great Muslim population of the country.
In 2019, it modified the Citizenship Law of India to effectively naturalize non -Muslim migrants of the neighboring countries.
Since he became Prime Minister in May 2021, the Sarma government evicted 50,000 people, mostly Bengali Muslims, 160 square kilometers of land, with more planned.
Only in the last month, around 3,400 Bengali Muslim houses have been razed in five eviction units through Assam, according to state data. The previous government evicted some 4,700 families in the five years until the beginning of 2021.
“Bengali speech Muslims, regardless of their legal status, have become vulnerable objectives for right -wing groups in India,” said Praveen Donthi, senior analyst at International Group crisis.
Indian opposition leaders have accused Sarma of using evictions and expulsions to polarize voters before the elections.
“These measures are politically beneficial and profitable for the BJP,” said Akhil Gogoi, an opposition legislator.
The main party of the opposition Congress, whose overwhelming defeat in the 2016 Assam elections gave the BJP its first government in the state, said it would rebuild the demolished houses and the prison to those who destroyed them if they returned to power.
Feelings against Bengali speech Muslims
The increase in evictions follows a deadly attack in April by tourists in the Indian Jammu and Kashmir (Iiojk) blamed Pakistan's “terrorists”, an accusation with vehemence for Islamabad. Since then, states governed by BJP have gathered thousands of Bengali Muslims, calling them suspicious of “illegal immigrants” and a potential security risk.
Analysts say that the worsening of the ties between New Delhi and Dhaka after the expulsion of Bangladesh's prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, has intensified feelings against Bengali speech Muslims, giving the BJP a political weapon to use for votes.
Bengali is the main language of the Muslim majority of Bangladesh and is also spoken widely in parts of India.
The states, including Assam, have also “delayed” hundreds of Bengali Muslims to Bangladesh. Some were returned because the appeals that challenge their non -Indian status were being heard in court, Reuters He has reported.
Assam's officials say that around 30,000 people have been declared foreign by courts in the state. Such people are usually long -term residents with families and land, and activists say that many of them are often erroneously classified as foreigners and are too poor to challenge tribunal judgments.
Nueva Delhi said in 2016 that around 20 million illegal migrants from Bangladesh lived in India.
“The Indian government is putting thousands of vulnerable people at risk in the apparent search for unauthorized immigrants, but their actions reflect broader discriminatory policies against Muslims,” said Elaine Pearson, director of Asia of Human Rights Watch.
The Indian Foreign Ministry said in May that the country had a list of 2,369 people to be deported to Bangladesh. He urged Bangladesh to accelerate the verification process.
The Bangladesh Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comments.
Since the elimination of Hasina and an increase in attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh, Sarma has often shared details of frustrated infiltration attempts, with images of trapped on social networks.
“The ethno-nationalism that had long encouraged Assam's policy merged without problems with the religious nationalism of the BJP,” Donthi said.
“The approach then changed Bengali speech strangers to Bengali speech Muslims.”
