‘Our home burnt, we jumped into river to escape’: As anger against ‘settlers’ comes to boil, a day of arson and rioting in Karbi Anglong

Mahima recalled the horror of the previous day: “There were so many police people stationed here after what happened on Monday, but there was no point to any of it. Everything happened right in front of them. Our house was burned, and we jumped into the river to save ourselves. We spent the night watching everything from the other side of the river. This morning, we found that nothing had been spared. Our house, our motorbike, our two shops in the market,” she said.

While people were rushing away from their homes amid the arson, Suraj Dey, who was disabled, was unable to. “My uncle went to try and help him, but the roof had already collapsed,” said his cousin Sumit Dey (20). “We were just not prepared for this kind of violence. We thought the fight was with people on the other side of the river.”

Karbi protesters, on their part, said the administration failed to address their concerns of encroachment on tribal land and the changing demography in the region, and botched the handling of a hunger strike by nine members of the Karbi community, which became the trigger for the violence.

The fissure

The Kopili River runs by the Kheroni daily market, and a bridge connects the market to the other bank. The river and this bridge have become a crucial marker of the long-simmering tensions in the area between the Karbi population and the non-Karbi settlers, primarily a Bihari population, as well as Bengali-Hindus and Nepalis. Karbi bodies demand that settlers, who they allege have illegally encroached on reserved VGR (Village Grazing Reserve) and PGR (Professional Grazing Reserve) land, be evicted.

This demand had gathered steam nearly two years ago, after the Rachnatmak Nonia Sanyukta Sangh, an organisation of the Bihari Nonia community, submitted a memorandum to President Droupadi Murmu in January 2024 seeking legalisation of settlers in West Karbi Anglong who had been there before 2011.

This sparked protests across the districts of Karbi Anglong and West Karbi Anglong, two tribal-majority hill districts administered in line with provisions of the 6th Schedule of the Constitution, with special protections for tribal rights, including restrictions on land acquisition. Karbis are the largest hill-dwelling tribe of Assam.

The protests in 2024 took a tense turn when some Karbi youths were injured in a fight with Bihari residents in Kheroni Chariali, “on the other side of the river.” The tensions resulted in the KAAC Chief Executive Member and BJP leader Tuliram Ronghang announcing a decision to evict over 2,000 families of “illegal encroachers.”

“Since then, things have been tense and hostile. Soon after that, the administration terminated the services of 10 sarkari gaonburahs (village headmen) for supposedly helping us settle here. Getting any kind of government documents has become difficult. It has been building up. So, to safeguard ourselves, we went to the High Court,” said Sanjay Bhagat, a resident who has filed a petition on behalf of 22 families that claim to have been here for the last 60 years.

They received an interim stay on the eviction, and in the meantime, another 317 families went to court in two separate cases, claiming that the land in question is not PGR/VGR land at all. The families received a stay, while the KAAC is yet to present its stand in court. The government has cited these ongoing cases as the reason that evictions have not taken place so far.

The flashpoint

Earlier this month, a group of nine people went on a hunger strike in Phelangpi village, around 3 km from the Kheroni daily market, demanding the evictions. It was when these protesters were removed from the site in the early hours of Monday – police later said they had been taken to Guwahati for medical examination – that the situation started spiralling, with Karbi youth apprehending that they had been arrested.

Angtong Engti Kathar, a protester from Phelangpi, said, “The High Court’s stay is only for the 300-something petitioners, while encroachers are around 2,000 households. By not acting on the rest for so long, the government has not been sincere in listening to and acting on the concerns of the Karbi tribals. The situation was completely manhandled by the administration when the protesters were removed from the site at around 3 in the morning. When that happened, people got upset and gathered from all over, with no leaders, and got swept away in a mob.”

Protesters torched Ronghang’s ancestral home in nearby Donkamokam, pelted stones, and ransacked shops on “the other side of the river” on Monday. On Tuesday afternoon and evening, it turned into arson and clashes with the police in the Kheroni daily market.

“The issue was supposed to be with encroachment on PGR/VGR lands, but then it took a communal turn when they started attacking the people on this side as well, with whom there had been no problems so far. They specifically attacked shops belonging to Bengalis and Biharis. Now my family is also feeling scared and is talking about leaving for a while,” said Shankar Nath, an Assamese who lives in Matikhola village nearby, who was surveying the destruction in the market.

Litsong Rongphar, who became the face of the hunger strike, while distancing himself and the others from the violence, said the unease in the area is not just over encroachment on PGR/VGR lands.

“This is supposed to be a protected sixth schedule area, but we are becoming minorities here because of continuous settling. Our main demand is the security of our land. Even though not all the families there have gotten a stay from the court, the government does not want to carry out evictions because it does not suit their Hindu-Muslim politics to take action against the population there. Because our demand has been neglected for so long, and these feelings have been continuing for a long time, when the police removed us from the site, people got inflamed with passion. We were also not able to stop them, and they went out of control,” he said.

He hinted that another reason for unease and demographic anxiety was that since 2017, the elected member of the KAAC from the local Kopili constituency in the area has been a Bihari leader, Pawan Kumar.

Karbi villagers in the area say they were shocked by the scale of violence that the area saw.

“We know that the main issue has been about PGR/VGR lands and that the resentment has been growing ever since the fight between the Karbi boys and the Bihari people in Kheroni Charali last year. But the protest in Phelangpi was supposed to be peaceful. Then we started hearing that the protesters were dragged away forcefully by police in the middle of the night and the news or rumours must have spread everywhere, because for the next few days, we saw youths moving through our village to go towards the market and the bridge, ready to fight,” said Bisyasing Rongphar (35), a resident of Jengkha village, about 9 km from the daily market.

Police said they are working to identify the assailants from Tuesday’s violence. “As per law, the magistrate had announced on a mic and told them on Tuesday afternoon that the assembly was unlawful since restrictions had been put in place. Despite being told to disperse, they didn’t and instead attacked the police. A total of 60 police personnel have been injured. We have a lot of video footage, and people are being identified. Legal action will be taken as required,” said DGP Harmeet Singh.