Lakhimpur eviction: Boginadi families settled after 1983 lose homes again

Families given land at Boginadi by the Lakhimpur district administration after the violence of 1983 have now been evicted from it by the same administration.

On Friday, November 13, revenue officials backed by a large police force cleared the No. 1 and No. 2 Boginadi Professional Grazing Reserve (PGR) under the Kadam Revenue Circle. District Commissioner Pronab Jit Kakoty and Senior Superintendent of Police Gunendra Deka supervised the drive, The Times of India reported. NEInsider had reported on the notices and families dismantling their own homes two days earlier, when the drive was expected on Thursday.

What the administration says

According to the district administration, 132 families of about 704 people were living on the reserve. The Times of India said around 320 hectares were cleared, a figure also given by The Sentinel and The Assam Tribune. The News Mill put the land reclaimed at 19 bighas, roughly 2.5 hectares, and The Sentinel's headline counted 135 homes. No single official figure has been published.

Kakoty said most families had already pulled down large parts of their houses after notices were served weeks earlier, and that the remaining structures were removed with heavy machinery. "The entire operation proceeded peacefully, and we did not encounter any resistance or obstruction," he told The Times of India. Deka said grazing reserve land is set aside for a public purpose and cannot be used for housing, and that surveys would continue across the district. The drive was carried out under the Assam Land and Revenue Regulation, 1886.

Who lived on the reserve

According to Northeast Now and The Assam Tribune, the cleared settlement, recorded in official documents variously as "Refugee Camp", "Muslim Camp" and "Miyan Camp", was where the administration placed Muslim families driven out of Bhimpora and nearby villages in the Bodhakora area during the violence of the Assam Agitation in 1983.

Seventy-three-year-old Manik Ali, a local BJP worker, told both papers that his family was among 25 families from Bhimpora who were first sheltered at Boginadi police station and then given land by the Deputy Commissioner's office. They hold identity cards issued by the North Lakhimpur sub-registrar on June 17, 1983. Mujibur Rahman, 70, said his family had been sharecroppers alongside Mising farmers in Bhimpora before the violence. Hanif Ali, 75, said Friday was his family's third displacement: erosion in Barpeta in 1977, the violence in 1983, and now the eviction.

The settlement had a government lower primary school (opened 2008), an Anganwadi centre, a Jal Jeevan Mission water scheme and power connections, Northeast Now reported. A mosque and its cemetery were also demolished; residents cited a September 25, 1992 letter allotting just over four bighas of the PGR for that use.

Some residents alleged that only Muslim households were served notices, while other communities living on neighbouring parts of the reserve were left alone. The families have asked the state government to relocate them, citing the administration's own role in settling them there.

Part of a district-wide campaign

Boginadi was the biggest site in a schedule of five Lakhimpur eviction drives between November 4 and 14 across the Bihpuria, North Lakhimpur and Kadam revenue circles. About 450 families across village and professional grazing reserves in the district had been served notices, The Sentinel said, with the last phase planned at Koilamari and Borbil on November 14. No report on that phase has appeared yet.

The wider picture

The Lakhimpur drive follows operations in other districts this month, including the razing of more than 640 homes at Alamganj in Dhubri and the Jamuna waterbody drive in Sivasagar. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has said the drives are not aimed at any religion and are about freeing government land.

An investigation by The New Humanitarian, cited by The Independent, counted at least 33 eviction operations in Assam between May 2021 and March 2026, displacing 20,387 families and demolishing more than 22,000 structures, most of them homes of Bengali-speaking Muslims.

What to watch

Key questions: will the state offer the Boginadi families resettlement, given it settled them there in 1983? Did the Koilamari and Borbil drives go ahead? And will the district publish one official figure for the land involved?