Assam Assembly election

The BJP workers sat in a dimly lit room with a thatched roof on March 15 at the mandal office of the BJP in Kheroni, which falls in the West Karbi Anglong district of Assam. With the Assembly election just weeks away, Rajendra Kramsa, the ST Morcha President of BJP from the West Karbi Anglong district, was trying to rally the 16 men and women at the BJP office. “We should also learn to draw tribal sympathy… BJP is a collective party. Some have said that the BJP is a party for the Biharis and Bengalis. What about Congress? Who is Rahul Gandhi? Is he someone from our tribe?” Kramsa charged. The Karbi tribe is a scheduled tribe.
In the last three years or so, the government of Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who belongs to the BJP, had been carrying out evictions across the State. Although other communities had also been affected in Karbi Anglong, the Chief Minister, in January, was quoted as saying, “Only ‘Miyas’ are evicted in Assam. How can Assamese people be evicted?” “Miya” is originally a term of abuse for Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam.

But for the last two years, however, the BJP had been faced with a different scenario in this region when it came to carrying out evictions. Protests were staged in Kheroni, demanding that the government clear professional village grazing reserves (VGR) and professional grazing reserves (PGR)—tracts of land set aside for livestock grazing, some of which are as old as the British period. Over time, Hindi-speaking non-tribals, mostly Hindus, had established themselves on land identified as PGR and VGR.

A political dilemma?
The Kopili river, being the largest south bank tributary of the Brahmaputra river, passes through the area of Kheroni. The PGR areas are on one side of the river. The road to Kheroni branches out from the bridge on the river. The road on both sides of Kheroni is lined with houses of non-tribals and government offices. Most of the area after these houses is a stretch of empty land. Some of the government offices on the road to Kheroni, including a branch of the State Bank of India, lie vacant. On the other side of the bridge, there is a market area where the epicentre of violence in December was located. The people residing in this area belong to the Karbi community.
As per information provided by Pawan Kumar, who is an elected member of Autonomous Council from Kopili, i.e., KAAC seat from Kheroni, "as of now, there are 42,003 voters in this area, out of which, 18,287 are Hindi-speaking, 10,796 belong to Karbi community, 3,506 are Nepali, 2,066 are Bengali, 1,040 are Assamese, 1,393 are Dimasa, and the rest are from other communities including tribes." Kumar himself is a third-generation migrant from Bihar, residing in Kheroni, and had been a member of ADC since 2017.