By Ahmer Khan And Tom Vaillant

The eviction machine

One person displaced every 25 minutes, 24 hours a day, for nearly five years. The vast majority of those evicted are Bengali-speaking Muslims – a campaign driven by Assam’s Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who is seen as a poster child for implementing the agenda of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Maiful*, 65, says her family received an eviction notice in November and were given a month to respond. Before dawn, just a day after the deadline, bulldozers arrived.

“At five in the morning, while we were sleeping, three JCBs came and started demolishing our house.”

The Miya

Many of those now facing eviction are Miya Muslims, Bengali-speaking Muslims whose ancestors migrated from the Bengal region – parts of which now lie in Bangladesh – to Assam during the colonial period and settled on low-lying river islands called chars. These were marginal, flood-prone strips of land that nobody else wanted. Their forefathers had little choice.

Many settled there 50 to 60 years ago after losing their original homes and farmland to the Brahmaputra’s relentless erosion. Over generations, they cleared the land, farmed it, and built communities on it.A Miya community on a char — a shifting riverine island on the Brahmaputra.Aerial view of char island settlements along the Brahmaputra.Life on the char. Miya communities have farmed these flood-prone strips of land for generations.

The word “Miya” was once a term of respect. Today, it is used as a slur to mark Bengali-speaking Muslims as outsiders, regardless of how long they have lived in Assam or whether they hold legal citizenship documents.

But since 2016, these communities have faced a different kind of uprooting: government-led eviction drives targeting what officials call “illegal encroachments”. It is a label with consequences. In Myanmar, the same logic was applied to Rohingya Muslims for decades, branding an entire community as illegal immigrants on land they had lived on for generations.

This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.