India pushes anti-Muslim eviction drive, targets Bengali-origin families as ‘foreigners’

NEW DELHI, India (MNTV) — Indian authorities in the northeastern state of Assam have launched a sweeping eviction campaign that has displaced over 5,000 Muslim families—most of them Bengali-origin citizens—under the pretext of protecting forest land. Rights advocates say the campaign is part of a broader Hindu nationalist project to dispossess Muslims, using land laws as tools of exclusion.

Assam, which borders Bangladesh and Myanmar, has long been a flashpoint for anti-Muslim sentiment. On Sunday, the state government bulldozed the homes of nearly 350 families living in forested areas, leaving them homeless. 

Many of those evicted are from the Miya Muslim community—descendants of Bengali-speaking Muslims who settled in the region generations ago, some as early as the 1970s.

The evictions, reported by the independent outlet Scroll, are the latest in a series of demolitions that have taken place across Assam since mid-June. So far, seven eviction drives have been carried out, with Muslim families pushed into roadside shelters or tarpaulin tents in the monsoon rains. No resettlement or compensation plans have been provided.

Videos circulating online show Hindu supremacist groups roaming Muslim neighborhoods, issuing threats. In one video, a man from the Jatiya Sangrami Sena—a far-right Assamese group—demands that Miya Muslims vacate the region within 24 hours. “Shut up, you Miya,” he shouts at a laborer, using a term now widely regarded as a slur.

Last week, another 1,500 Muslim families were evicted from a different forested area on Assam’s border with Nagaland, where more than 4,000 homes and structures were destroyed over five days. The government has announced plans to continue the drive, with 200 more families scheduled for eviction in the coming days.

Muslim residents say the demolitions are not just about land—they are about identity. In several areas, non-Muslim residents living on the same public land were spared eviction, while Muslim families received notices. Civil rights groups say this points to systematic religious apartheid under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist administration.

Assam’s Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, a key Modi ally, openly justified the religious targeting. “If indigenous people are living [unauthorized], we don’t consider it encroachment,” he said. “Only those who have come from Bangladesh, we consider encroachers.” In practice, this label is applied almost exclusively to Muslims, regardless of their legal citizenship.

This framing of Bengali-origin Muslims as “foreigners” has long been used to disenfranchise them—from denying land rights to excluding them from citizenship registers. Although many evicted families hold government-issued ID and voter documents, their claims to belonging are routinely rejected.

Now, with bulldozers clearing settlements that have stood for decades and right-wing vigilantes issuing threats with impunity, human rights defenders warn that India is sliding into a new phase of anti-Muslim persecution—one that combines state policy, majoritarian rhetoric, and grassroots terror to erase entire communities.