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Assam, India – Akram Ali stood by the ruins of his four-room house under the scorching April heat, sifting through the debris where his life once stood.
“This was my home built more than 45 years ago,” Ali, 50, said, his eyes tearing up. “Now it’s all rubble.”
On the morning of March 14, bulldozers descended on Islampur, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in Bongora on the outskirts of Guwahati, the main city in the northeastern Indian state of Assam.
For the next four hours, more than three dozen bulldozers razed down homes, including Ali’s, rendering 400 families homeless from 177 hectares (437 acres) of land allegedly protected for Assam’s Indigenous people under a state government law.
Ali now lives in a makeshift tarpaulin shanty a few kilometres (miles) from his demolished home.
Akram Ali stands at the ruins of his four-room house in Bongora [Arshad Ahmed/Al Jazeera]Playing a viral video of him crying inconsolably on his mobile phone, the daily wage worker told Al Jazeera his home, like others in Bongora, was demolished despite his Indigenous identity.
“I am Goriya, son of the soil, but my home was still flattened,” Ali said. “It was my entire life’s hard work.”
The Goriyas are an Assamese-speaking Muslim community mostly settled in the tea belt of eastern Assam. They are one of the five subgroups of Muslim communities – along with Moriya, Syed, Deshi and Julha – recognised by the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as native or Indigenous to the state in 2022.
These communities have enjoyed relative safety over their cultural and ethnic identity, being distinct from the Bengali-speaking Muslims, who for decades have been labelled “outsiders”, “infiltrators” or “illegal migrants” – even though most of these families have lived in Assam for several generations.
Muslims constitute more than a third of Assam’s 31 million population, according to the last census conducted in 2011 – the highest among all Indian states. Of them, nearly 6.3 million are Bengali-speaking Muslims – pejoratively called “miyas” – while about 4 million Muslims are considered “Indigenous” to the land.
It is this last set of Muslims that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP has been reaching out to in the run-up to Thursday’s legislative assembly election in Assam, where the party has been in power since 2016 and is now eyeing a third consecutive term.
As Assam’s Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma – a divisive 57-year-old politician who has been heading the BJP’s crackdown on the “miyas” since he assumed office in 2021 – ramps up his outreach to the Indigenous Muslims, the community members, including Ali, question whether the distinction between them and Bengali-speaking Muslims offers any real protection.
“Weren’t our homes demolished because we are Muslims?” asked Ali.
The ruins of Akram Ali’s house after it was demolished in Bongora [Arshad Ahmed/Al Jazeera]What’s behind BJP’s outreach?
Sarma and his party have repeatedly assured Indigenous Muslims that only “miyas” are the targets of the government’s crackdown, which in recent years has included eviction from lands, demolition of homes, erasure of their names from electoral rolls, and even arrests, detentions and expulsion to Bangladesh, their alleged homeland.
Sarma has frequently emphasised that his government will “never target” Indigenous Assamese Muslims with such exclusionary policies.
Addressing a rally on March 6 in eastern Assam, Sarma claimed Indigenous Muslims “support the BJP”. The Assam BJP’s Vice President Aparaajitaa Bhuyan told Al Jazeera the party is eyeing as many votes from Assamese Muslims as possible.
At the same time, Chief Minister Sarma has made clear that the BJP’s outreach to Muslims of Assamese ancestry does not extend to Bengali-origin Muslims. “The BJP does not need ‘miya’ votes for another 10 years,” Sarma had said in 2023.
Bonojit Hussain, a political analyst from Assam, told Al Jazeera that Sarma’s outreach to Assam’s Indigenous Muslims is motivated by two factors: One, the BJP wants to dilute its communal image, and two, the party wants the votes of Assamese Muslims in constituencies where both the Indigenous Muslims and Hindus call the shots.
“If the BJP stokes up anti-Muslim sentiment and drives a wedge between the Hindus and Muslims, then it will puncture the social fabric between them,” Hussain said. “Such a communal manoeuvre from the BJP may backfire as Assamese Hindus and Muslims, except for the religion, share the same culture.”
Hussain pointed out that the right-wing party is targeting constituencies in northern and eastern Assam where the number of Assamese Muslim voters ranges from 30,000 to 50,000, a decisive figure to sway the vote in an assembly constituency.
“Take, for example, the Nalbari legislative constituency with over 1,95,100 voters. Assamese Muslims contribute over 25 percent of the vote share there,” Hussain said.
In Barkhetri, another assembly seat in northern Assam, of the 2,17,028 voters, about 80,000 are Assamese Muslims.
The stakes are even higher for the BJP in mainly Assamese-speaking eastern Assam, colloquially called the Upper Assam region.
Upper Assam-based journalist Firoz Khan told Al Jazeera that Indigenous Muslims decide the election in seven or eight of the 39 seats in the region. “With Assamese Muslims being key to these seats, the BJP has toned down its communal politics in the region and is continuously trying to woo the Assamese Muslims,” he said.
Three Indigenous Muslim women clad in traditional Assamese attire [Arshad Ahmed/Al Jazeera]Indigenous Muslim groups say that while some within the community could vote for the BJP and its regional ally, the Asom Gana Parishad, because of their 2022 recognition of their community as Indigenous, a majority of them are unlikely to be swayed.
Moinul Islam, spokesman for the Indigenous Assamese rights-based organisation, Sadou Asom Goria Jatiya Parishad, told Al Jazeera the BJP’s exclusionary policies towards Muslims will not persuade the Indigenous Muslims to help Sarma win a third term for the BJP.
Before the demolition drive in Bongora, where Ali lost his home, the government in July and August last year also evicted hundreds of “goriyas” from alleged government land in Lakhimpur and Golaghat districts. The BJP’s drive to file false objections against Muslim names in the voter list also affected thousands of Goriya Muslims.
BJP spokesman Kishore Upadhyay, however, denied the charges. “Any allegations of Assamese Muslims being evicted and pushed across to Bangladesh is malicious, biased and politically motivated,” he told Al Jazeera.
‘Erasing our legacy’
Indigenous Muslim groups also say the BJP is attempting to erase their cultural identity and legacy, as a resurgent and violent Hindu supremacist ideology dominates Assam, eroding the safety cushion they once enjoyed.
In the run-up to the polls last month, Sarma changed the name of the only medical college in Assam, named after a Goriya Muslim, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, in Assam’s Barpeta district.
Ahmed was a prominent freedom fighter during India’s independence movement against the British. In the 1970s, he served as the country’s first president from the state, and the third Muslim president in all.
Sarma justified the name change by claiming all medical colleges in Assam are named after the area in which they are located, though he later said “another educational or cultural institution of the same or higher stature” could be named to honour Ahmed.
In December last year, Sarma suggested dehyphenating Sankar-Azan, which combines the names of 15th-century Assamese polymath Srimanta Sankardev and Azan Peer, a 17th-century Sufi saint, who together symbolised Assam’s syncretic history.
Isfaqur Rahman, a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Assam, said the BJP government’s “Hindu nationalism is slowly erasing the legacy of Assamese Muslims”.
He pointed out how the chief minister called the 16th-century warrior Ismail Siddique, popularly known as Bagh Hazarika, a “fictional character” and asked for proof of his existence. Siddique is recorded in local history as a legendary Indigenous general who fought with a Hindu ruler to resist the Mughal advances in the region.
Responding to allegations that the BJP was erasing the cultural legacy of Assam’s Indigenous Muslims, spokesman Upadhyay said they were a “politically motivated narrative designed to mislead” the people.
But back in Bongora, Ali said his conscience does not now allow him to vote for the BJP.
“After we were evicted, the chief minister said we are illegal immigrants. He has already broken our backbones by demolishing our homes,” he said. “We are the new miyas.”
