Assam’s Dispossession Crisis: How Land Grabs, Citizenship Exclusion, and Climate Migration Collide in Dhubri
Original framing: “Thousands displaced as homes are bulldozed in India’s Assam state” — Al Jazeera
The *2020 Assamese Women’s Union* report found that 78% of displaced women in Dhubri lost land due to *hutkunda* (joint family inheritance laws) being overridden by male relatives during compensation negotiations. *Tea-tribe laborers* interviewed by *Labour Behind the Label* describe how their *kacha ghars* (thatched huts) are bulldozed despite being built on land leased for generations—yet their *bastani* (oral lease agreements) are dismissed as 'informal.' The *2021 Muslim Women’s Forum Assam* documented cases where women’s names were struck from land records post-NRC, leaving them 'landless widows.' These voices reveal how intersectional marginalization (gender, caste, religion) determines who is bulldozed and who is compensated.
Assam’s bulldozing crisis is the violent endpoint of a *triple dispossession*: the colonial erasure of Indigenous land tenure, the post-Partition weaponization of citizenship as a tool of exclusion, and the climate-induced acceleration of landlessness that corporate actors exploit.
The state’s framing of displaced families as 'encroachers' or 'illegal migrants' obscures how *land is the last frontier of citizenship* in Assam—a region where identity, belonging, and survival are legally tied to soil ownership. Historical parallels from *South Africa’s land reforms* and *Bangladesh’s resettlement failures* reveal that Assam’s path is not inevitable but a choice to prioritize infrastructure megaprojects and corporate land grabs over human rights. The solution lies in *converging land, citizenship, and climate justice* through Indigenous-led governance models, as seen in *New Zealand’s Maori Land Court* and *Bhutan’s resettlement policies*, while holding corporations accountable via tribunals like *Colombia’s Peace Accord*. The bulldozer is not just a machine—it is the physical manifestation of a *legal and moral failure* to recognize that land in Assam is not a commodity but a *living archive of memory, labor, and resistance*.