A few days ago, on one of Guwahati’s busy roads, I ran into a friend I had studied with thirty years ago. He had gone on to earn an MCA, a handsome salary and all the comforts that come with it. What struck me was not his success but his state of mind.
“I gradually became like a machine,” he told me. “Thirty years passed in the blink of an eye. Nobody has time to talk anymore. I went back to the village, fed up with city life, but it was the same there. Everyone was staring at a mobile phone.”
This was a man who had been the life of our college days, known for his wit. As we parted, he managed a faint smile and offered one more thought. “Day and night, second after second, our heads are under assault from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, reels and videos. The brain has limits. I can no longer say exactly what I did the day before yesterday. In college we could narrate something from three months earlier in detail. We have all become victims of short-term memory, like in Ghajini. And among Assamese people, perhaps it is even worse.”
His words stayed with me when I read that an “Operation Against 420” had been launched across Assam on the Chief Minister’s instructions, beginning 11 September. Something about it felt familiar. My own memory, I confess, was no better than my friend’s, so I went back to the newspapers I have kept.
We have seen this film before
The report I found was in an Assamese daily dated 22 September 2021. Its headline said the government aimed to eradicate “broker raj” ahead of Mission Basundhara, and that 520 land brokers had been arrested in the state. Police, it said, had been conducting operations since the previous night in various districts, arresting not only brokers but also employees of revenue circle offices.
The backdrop was clear. On 7 September 2021, at a state conference of Additional Deputy Commissioners (Revenue) and Circle Officers at Srimanta Sankaradeva Kalakshetra in Guwahati, Chief Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma had warned land brokers to mend their ways. The crackdown was welcomed at the time by political parties, organisations and ordinary citizens who had long suffered at the hands of middlemen.
Yet even then, doubts surfaced. Why were only the minnows being caught? Reports expressed public surprise that no big names, including some BJP leaders and a legislator who had recently joined the party, had been touched. Then Leader of the Opposition Debabrata Saikia alleged that most of those arrested were petty operators dealing in land documents and tarani. He asked whether the Bhawanipur MLA who had joined the BJP was a land broker or a land lawyer, recalling that the Speaker himself had once told that MLA in the Assembly, “You know land-related matters quite well.” The opposition charged that, with by-elections near, the drive was meant to buy cheap popularity.
Five years on, the same question returns. After a few hundred small-time brokers are arrested, will the real rot actually end? That rot includes irregularities in land transactions, mountains of corruption in land reclassification, landowners selling off land by deceiving tenants, and indigenous people being evicted for lacking pattas so that their land can be handed to corporations. Or is the aim merely to clear out the small fish and make room for a new kind of land mafia?
Since our collective memory seems to be growing hazier, let me jog it with a few examples.
Four cases the operation has not touched
Mikir Bamuni, Nagaon
During the Sarbananda Sonowal government, land in Mikir Gaon Bamuni (also known as Mikir Bamuni Grant),a village located under the Samaguri revenue circle in central Assam’s Nagaon district, that was in the possession of tenants was sold. In reply to a question from Debabrata Saikia in the Assembly, the then Revenue Minister acknowledged that the tenants held 78 khatian records. Even so, without the tenants’ knowledge, revenue officials and staff helped the landowners complete the sale. Has the government investigated such collusion to this day?
Ingle Pathar, Kaziranga
Land at Ingle Pothar, historically known as Hati Pothar, is a 60-bigha tract near Kaziranga National Park in Assam that local tea-tribe families have cultivated for generations. The land is now being taken for a five-star hotel, although some residents hold raiyati khatian documents, and the government itself allotted land to several families long ago. Who will rein in a project next to Kaziranga National Park that allegedly flouts environmental law and bypasses the land acquisition process? Critics see a pattern in the government’s push to shrink the Kaziranga Eco-Sensitive Zone to a minimum of one kilometre. They say it serves hotel developers and those who want to quarry stone in the neighbouring hills of Karbi Anglong.
LGBI Airport, Guwahati
Local residents have long alleged a plan to acquire 6,672 bighas across 16 villages under the Azara and Palashbari revenue circles near Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi International (LGBI) Airport, Guwahati. The villages include Bongra, Pachaniapara, Allirbari, Jowai, Patgaon, Rajapanichanda, Tarawati, Gosaiahat, Lochana, Sathikarani, Rangapara, Batabari Sajjanpara, Dharampur, Kaharapara and Andherijuli. Reports say 2,662 bighas would go to the Adani Group, which operates the LGBI airport, for an aerocity, with a satellite township on the rest. Dinesh Das, general secretary of the Sangrami Krishak Shramik Sangha, says 60 per cent of residents in these villages are tribal and 90 per cent depend on agriculture. What do we call it when people in a tribal belt are pushed out and their land handed to big business? Those who won power promising to protect Assam’s jati, mati, bheti (community, land and homestead) are now accused of targeting the land and homes of the very people they pledged to defend.
Farmland on the move
Even as protests continue across the state against handing agricultural land to capitalists, 28,521 bighas of agricultural land were reclassified between 2021-22 and 2024-25. That is roughly 19 bighas a day in six districts, with Kamrup topping the list at 3,509 bighas. The Justice Biplab Sarma Committee, formed to implement Clause 6 of the Assam Accord, strongly recommended halting such reclassification. The conversions continue regardless. Most recently, 70 bighas were bought at Khanduba village in Dharamtul, Morigaon, for a cement plant, reportedly after villagers were told a warehouse would come up. Residents of the village itself were not allowed to take part in the 29 August public hearing. Who will stop this brokerage by deception of ordinary farmers?
As the rest of the country struggles with drought and rising temperatures, Assam and the Northeast are becoming a promised land for well-funded businesses, and the pressure on our land will only grow.
Who will stop the real cheating?
Section 420 of the now-repealed Indian Penal Code dealt with cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property, punishable by up to seven years in prison and a fine. The law may have changed, but the offence has not.
Across almost every part of Assam, thousands of indigenous people are losing land they have held for generations, through deception or through pressure to sell. Many of them believe in the idea of community property resources and hold no formal papers. They are the first casualties of so-called development and are being evicted.
The real test of “Operation Against 420” is not the number of petty brokers in custody. It is whether any government has the courage to stop the large-scale cheating of Assam’s indigenous sons and daughters, and the coercion that forces them to give up their land.
Until then, the operation will remain what critics said it was in 2021: a spectacle that catches the small fish while the big ones swim free.