The violent video from a recent eviction drive should be a moment of reckoning for Assamese society

The Assamese are a proud people. A common refrain among us goes “Aami Axomiya, nohou dukhiya, kihor dukhiya hou – We are Assamese, we will never be poor, how dare we be poor?” From resisting the advances of the Mughal Empire, to producing fierce revolutionaries against British rule, to preserving the last vestiges of the world’s rhino population, there are many things we can be proud of.

But our treatment of those we consider unwanted is not one of those things.

On September 23, our collective consciousness was shaken by footage of 33-year-old Moinul Haque being shot and battered to death, by the police but also by a photographer accompanying them. We watched the photographer, a crazed man consumed with rage, inflict violence on a person who, in his eyes, was not fit to be human.

The incident took place during an eviction drive in Sipajhar in Assam’s Darrang district. But this act of aggression was preceded by a wave of eviction drives against people the government termed “illegal encroachers”. These exercises were carried out in different districts united by one common thread – they were all districts heavily populated by Muslims of Bengali origin. In a state with a tortured history of anti-immigrant resentment,…

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