The Assam government’s flagship land regularisation scheme, Mission Basundhara, has been touted as the one-stop shop for all of Assam’s land problems. However, this impression was punctured by the state’s own Chief Minister when, on February 8, 2024, he stated unambiguously that Mission Basundhara was not meant for citizens, but only for the “indigenous people” of Assam, equating them with the category of “aboriginals”.
It was, therefore, he went on to state, not meant for the Bengali Muslim or Miya population in the state, nor others such as Marwaris, Biharis, etc. At the start, it must be clarified that Mission Basundhara, as the official website describes it, is a policy meant for citizens. The Mission seeks to streamline and make land revenue services more accessible to citizens, through accelerated disposal of services, thus creating an “ease of doing business environment in the land management ecosystem”.
It is not a scheme introduced for targeting a particular section of society under any affirmative action policy but is the broadest exercise in streamlining land records and revenue management. It cannot, therefore, be limited to any one section, let alone a legally invalid and unconstitutional category as “Aboriginals” or “indigenous people”.
The Indian state does not recognise the internationally recognised political category of indigenous people in the context of India, as it holds all Indians are indigenous (a term it defines about colonisers). Secondly, it is important to lay out the politics of settlement of the land question in Assam through a scheme like Mission Basundhara.
Mission Basundhara 2.0, the second phase of its implementation, lists seven services that it seeks to undertake, most of which relate to regularising land held by cultivators to which they have no legal title. Settlement of land, a state exercise dating back to the colonial period that used to be carried out once about every 30 years, has been almost abandoned since the sixties in most parts of the country.
Once again, it is the broadest exercise of settling lands and updating land records in the names of those who are currently and legitimately in possession of the land at the time of settlement. It cannot, therefore, be treated as part of an affirmative action exercise that only pertains to one section of the cultivating population. It can put in place special emphasis and protections for sections who have historically been alienated from land, as has been the case, particularly with Scheduled Tribe communities all across India.
It cannot, however, be limited to settling lands of STs alone. Mission Basundhara 2.0, as per the Chief Minister’s remarks, is limited to the indigenous, landless and poor cultivators. To settle only “indigenous” lands is legally impossible as there is no legal working definition of what it means to be indigenous in Assam. It is precisely for this reason that the Assam government has had to set arbitrary criteria to define “indigenous” to operationalise it.
It has chosen to draw from the Forest Rights Act’s criteria of determining ‘Other Traditional Forest Dwellers’ – a category that has nothing to do with the notion of indigeneity. The criteria involve showing continued occupation of a piece of land for either 3 generations or 75 years. By this definition, however, many Bengali Muslims may well qualify, and many tribal and other Assamese peasants may not.
There is little truth, then, in stating that Mission Basundhara is not meant for Bengali Muslim peasants in Assam. Finally, as the Chief Minister’s statements pander to tribal and other communities native to Assam, implying they are the key constituency of the scheme, the khilonjia or the indigenous population of Assam should be wary of it. The limits and criteria set by the state in settling land with the cultivating classes severely limit the extent of land they will gain title to.
For example, in grazing lands such as PGR/VGRs, households can only get up to one bigha of homestead land. In government or khas lands, a maximum of 7 bighas of agricultural land is allowed, and only on condition of being landless. In a clever manoeuvre, the state has collapsed land settlements with a distributive agenda carrying forward the spirit of land reforms. The two are distinct exercises. Land settlement relates to a process of regularising land occupations in the names of the rightful occupant.
Land redistribution entails land to the landless. The constituencies of the two processes are different, although may overlap in certain instances. In limiting the land settlement exercise to the landless, the state places itself in a particularly fruitful position to acquire large amounts of land, currently being held by cultivating classes, without having to pay a single penny by way of compensation.
If anything, the limits and criteria set by Mission Basundhara 2.0 facilitate the state’s takeover of large swathes of agricultural land from the hands of peasants, indigenous and otherwise. This is part of a broader trend across the country where states attempt to bypass the 2013 Land Acquisition Act to acquire land for so-called development projects and create other means of amassing land into state land banks. Those cheering land rights for the indigenous in Assam should, therefore, be aware that what limited rights in land will be granted, will be granted selectively and subservient to the priorities of the state.
The streamlining of property rights and facilitation of ease of doing business are important indicators of these priorities – the accumulation of lands made easily available for corporate capital and business ventures. This should be amply clear through the case of the land grab of agricultural fertile land in Mikir Bamuni Grant, a village in Nagaon district, for a solar power plant built by Azure Power Forty Private Ltd. In this case, all state institutions were mobilised to facilitate the unlawful transfer of the said land into the hands of the corporation in gross violation of the rights of the tenant farmers. In his address at the Assembly, Himanta Biswa Sarma was clear in pointing out who calls the shots.
He insisted that land rights cannot simply be given because people apply for them. Instead, the state will have to determine whether rights are to be granted or not, based on set criteria. He then went on to clarify he hadn’t given any land titles in his constituency in areas like Amingaon because, he explained, “it is government land and valuable land”. The same was the case for Sualkuchi, Palashbari, and Rangia. Many of these lands are earmarked for the expansion of Guwahati city’s metropolitan area.
The writing on the wall is clear. While the demand for “land rights to the indigenous” has strong political purchase in Assam, in its Mission Basundhara avatar it is a smokescreen for a mega-scale land grab for a land-hungry state, and the biggest loser will be the peasant and small farmer. At the same time, it serves the politically divisive agenda of depriving particularly Bengali Muslim peasants from getting rights to the land they cultivate.
In yet another clever manoeuvre, the Chief Minister chose to attack the feudal figure of the matabbar amongst Bengali Muslims in char areas for his control over land, while justifying the takeover of lands in the hands of the Miya population. Invoking a land reform agenda and harping on the continuing feudal conditions and the need to challenge the concentration of power in the hands of matabbars in char areas, he made a case for state takeover of these lands.
However, he made no mention of the tenant cultivators who cultivate the lands of matabbars and who should be the rightful owners of those lands in the true spirit of the land reform agenda. Even as he attacked the feudal power of the matabbars, his feudal overtures slipped out as he claimed Mission Basundhara is a “special gesture for the aboriginal people of Assam”, a “gift”.
This is not how rights are granted in a democratic republic. They are granted based on being citizens, and they may be specially granted as part of constitutionally mandated affirmative action policies. Gifts are given by kings to their subjects, not by states to their citizens. The basis of granting land rights in the state must be rooted in the interests and needs of the cultivating classes.
Challenging feudal institutions is central to this agenda – the matabbars as much as the satras, who have been some of the biggest landowners across the Brahmaputra valley. However, for Mission Basundhara to truly ensure land rights for cultivators, it must place the interests of the cultivator at the centre, not the demands of capitalist accumulation and profit maximisation of corporates – land to the tiller, not ease of doing business.
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The weaponisation of the land policy does not spell doom for Bengali Muslim peasants alone, but for all peasants of Assam, as it erodes the very democratic basis of claim-making over land, to pave the way for feudal maharajas to bestow rewards on subjects of his choosing.
The author is assistant professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Guwahati. The opinions expressed in the article are of the author and do not reflect the view of EastMojo.
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