Manikajan Bibi is scared of losing her home. It is one windowless room built with tin sheets held together by wooden beams. In nervous anti...
Manikajan Bibi is scared of losing her home. It is one windowless room built with tin sheets held together by wooden beams. In nervous anticipation, she has bundled this season’s harvest of rice into two sacks, her sarees in a fraying mud brown rexine bag. A rusty trunk holds everything else – mostly a bunch of yellowing documents to make sure she can prove, if asked, that she is indeed Manikajan Bibi, daughter of Achumuddin Ahmed, an Indian citizen.
Bibi is a resident of Niz Salmara, a village on a char, as the shifting sandbars in the middle of the Brahmaputra river are called in Assam. Niz Salmara is in the Sipajhar area of Darrang district. Further down the same char lies Dholpur, a cluster of villages cleared last week to make space for an organic agriculture project.
On September 23, as the evictions ran into resistance, the police opened fire, killing two people, including a 12-year-old boy.
Residents of Niz Salmara have not yet received an eviction notice but they fear they could be next in line. “From the words and actions of the government, it seems they won’t let us Miya Muslims stay here,” said Bibi. “So if they come for us, we have to make sure...
