Photo: Collected
The state government demolished the homes of more than 600 Muslim families at Lutumari Longjap in Nagaon district of India’s Assam state last Sunday, alleging that they had occupied reserved forest land. Just a day earlier, more than 500 families were evicted in three other districts of the state, which borders Bangladesh. In all, more than 1,100 Muslim families were evicted in two days.
A senior official of the Assam forest department gave this information to the Indian news outlet Scroll. The administration claims the families had been living on encroached forest land. Sunday was the second day of the eviction drive.
Senior state government officials told Scroll that on Saturday, the day before, drives were carried out under tight security in Nagaon, Golaghat and Hojai districts, evicting a total of 547 families — 336 in Nagaon, 59 in Golaghat and 152 in Hojai. Most of those evicted are Bengali-speaking Muslims.
The families in Lutumari had been living for decades on more than 300 hectares of reserved forest land. Those affected say they are not illegal occupiers; it was the government itself that resettled them there.
After his house was demolished on Sunday, 44-year-old Lutumari resident Abdun Noor said, ‘The government resettled us here in 1974. We are originally from the nearby town of Juria. Because our forefathers were landless, the government set up a settlement for us here. In all, 300 landless families were given four bighas of land each.’
Abdun Noor said they had also filed a case in the Gauhati High Court to stop the eviction — ‘We filed a case against the eviction in the Gauhati High Court, but the court gave us no relief.’ He claimed that more than 10 mosques were also demolished in the drive, some of them over 50 years old. He said, ‘We used to work as labourers for the forest department. That is why many people were brought here.’
Last June, the All India Union of Forest Working People had urged the Assam government to drop its plan to evict villagers from the Lutumari Longjap reserved forest. The organisation argued that the people of four villages in the area had been settled there under the British colonial-era ‘taungya’ forest management system, so it was wrong to class them as ordinary forest encroachers.
Under the taungya system, people living in the forest worked under the forest department and grew food crops alongside commercially valuable trees. The British introduced the system in the mid-19th century, and it was later applied in some areas of Assam as well.
The four forest villages are Kandarpa Longjap, Padumoni, Hatijuri and No 9 Kheroni. According to figures compiled by Scroll, around 19,000 families, most of them Muslim, have been evicted from government land in Assam during the 10 years of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rule. The figures were drawn from information provided by the state’s revenue and disaster management department and the district administrations concerned.
Background
Major eviction drives have taken place in Lutumari before. Northeast Now reported on 1 December 2025 that around 1,500 families were evicted in a drive to clear about 795 hectares of the Lutimari reserved forest in Nagaon district.
Background source: Northeast Now, 1 December 2025
