THE POLITICS OF EVICTION
On a September morning, Waqil Hussain sits on the bank of a small stream of the Brahmaputra river. It’s a scorcher of a day and the gentle breeze fails to bring relief to the 18-year-old who rests under a tree, consumed by the news on Assamese news channels playing on his smartphone as he tries to make sense of the events of the past week. Hussain, a carpenter’s assistant, is among the many in Dholpur village in the Sipajhar area of Assam’s Darrang district who lost their homes in an eviction drive started by the state government on September 20.
Dholpur, a sandbar sandwiched between two streams of the Brahmaputra, lies 70 km northeast of Guwahati. Hussain’s home was just 100 metres away from where he sits now. And though he and his fellow villagers are, as instructed, camping in temporary tin structures just across the stream, the teenager often crosses over to spend time near his lost “home”. There was little resistance from Dholpur’s residents at the time of eviction, which is why Hussain scours the news, desperate to understand what went wrong on September 23—the fourth day of the eviction—when the police opened fire, killing two villagers, including a 12-year-old boy.
