With a small chunk of land allotted at Shyampur in Dalgaon revenue circle, Asar Uddin has been living a difficult life at the new place after he was forced to remove his habitat at No 1 Dhalpur village in Sipajhar revenue circle of Darrang district a year ago.
Without any land to cultivate, he is broke. To sustain the family of seven members, he has to work as a daily wager.
He earns around Rs 500 when he gets work as a daily labourer and as the area has been reeling under recurring floods, he does not get work every day. The difficulties add to the woes of Asar, as well as around 700 families relocated to the new place when they have to incur extra expenses for unforeseen document-related changes for various government aid.
Asar’s family is one of the 2051 families the Assam government has been evicting from the Gorukhuti area since September 2021.
On 23 September that year, two Muslim persons were killed in Dhalpur village when the heavily armed security persons started the eviction drive and the peasants resisted. On the fateful day, 28-year-old Moinul Haque was shot dead and stomped up by a government photographer as he charged towards the armed officers while his house was being demolished. Caught on camera, the incident made upheavals internationally for xenophobic hatred towards the Bangali-speaking Muslims of Assam— pejoratively called Miyas by other sections of Assamese society but asserted as group identity by the persecuted people.
Every resettled household, which dots the lush plain but presents a depressing view, has been facing fearful days because they have to include their names in the voters’ list of the new village under the Dalgaon assembly constituency.
“Our names have been removed from the voters of Dhalpur village under Khanua Panchayat without informing us. Now we have to get ourselves registered here to get our voting rights back otherwise will lose that too”, Asar said. However, the process to get registered in the voter list of Shyampur village is not easy for the evictees.
“I had submitted my documents to the BLO (booth level officer) for inclusion of my family members in the voters’s list. But the BLO said that it was not done, it got rejected. Now I am told that we have to submit the application online and pay Rs 300 per voter. How can I afford as there are 17 people in the extended family?” Asar asked.
Every individual Maktoob spoke to said the same thing. “After we were relocated here, we have very little income. It is either rice distributed as relief or supplied under the PDS scheme. How can we arrange Rs 300 per person for changing our constituency?” 60-year-old Afjal Hoque said.
As the inclusion in the voters’s list at their new village remains a challenge, the villagers also complained that the shifting of their votes was not their choice.
“We did not know anything about the change. When we checked online for our names in the voters’ list of Dhalpur village we did not find our names. Our names were removed from the voters’ list there”, Asar and his fellow villagers said in unison.
For 65-year-old Jahura Khatun, paying Rs 300 is daunting. “We have 6 voters in the family. So it will cost us around Rs 1800 to shift our votes here. At a time when we are surviving from the money our children sent from Kerala, how can we manage such a huge amount?”
Aware of the issue of transferring the votes of evicted people of Dhalpur, the All Assam Minority Students’ Union (AAMSU) asked the district administration to ensure no harassment is meted out to the victims. “As their names have already been removed from the Dhalpur voters’s list, it is the responsibility of district officials to include their names under the Dalgaon assembly constituency immediately. They should strictly monitor the process and ensure that nobody has to pay any money to any intermediatory person”, Darrang district AAMSU president Mahbubul Alom said.
Assam Sankhyalaghu Sangram Parishad (ASSP), a minority rights body pursuing the cause of land allotment to evicted families across Assam questioned the district administration’s move to remove the voters from Dhalpur village. ASSP central committee president Mohammad Khalifa said, “I have asked the district administration why they removed the voters arbitrarily from the electoral roll. They should have shifted the names of voters from there to Dalgaon. Now it is the district administration’s responsibility to get the evicted peoples’ names in the voters’ list without any difficulty.”
While the distressed people were anxious about how to get their names included in the voters’s list, reacting strongly against the demand for money for shifting of names in the electoral roll, Darrang district deputy commissioner Munindra Nath Ngatey told Maktoob, “There is absolutely no need to pay a single rupee. I will personally ensure that every person gets their names included in the voters’ list and if anybody tries to ask for money, I will suspend that person immediately”.
