Now Amit Shah Rakes up ‘Land Jihad’ Bogey during Election Rally in Assam

by Abbas Adil

 Home Minister Amit Shah raked up the bogey of ‘Land Jihad’ in an election rally in Assam on Friday thereby stoking communal fears that Muslims are up for grabbing land.

Addressing the rally of his Bharatiya Janata Party in Kamrup district, Shah said that if his party is re-elected to power in the assembly elections  they will bring law against ‘land Jihad’ and ‘love jihad’, another bogey that assumes Muslim men entice Hindu women into love to convert them to Islam.

“The BJP’s manifesto has several items. But the biggest among them is that the BJP government will work towards bringing in laws against love and land jihad,” Shah was quoted as saying by NDTV.

Shah’s polemic was in line with the earlier statements of the BJP government in Assam that it would enact laws to curb forced religious conversions and also protect the land rights of ethnic Assamese.

Like ‘love Jihad’, ‘land Jihad’ is a bogus theory peddled by  Hindutva groups and members of BJP in their communally charged speeches in a number of states in North India accusing Muslims of land grabs.

The term first came to limelight in December 2017 when a Muslim family was forced to surrender its house in a Hindu dominated locality in Meerut after there were protests by Hindu residents who said they would not let a Muslim be their neighbour. The Hindu man who had sold his house to a Muslim man Nauman Ahmad was accused of having been trapped by Muslims into ‘land Jihad’.

In October 2020, when Jammu and Kashmir High Court declared the Roshni Act, formally known as the Jammu and Kashmir State Land (Vesting Ownership to the Occupants) Act of 2001, unconstitutional, Kavinder Gupta, BJP leader in J&K, was quick to term the order a ‘surgical strike’ on ‘land Jihad’ as he alleged that Muslims had encroached upon government land in Hindu dominated areas of Jammu.

But when the local government released the list of beneficiaries of the Act, it showed that majority of the people who benefited in Jammu were non-Muslims including BJP leaders who had either been made use of the Act or had encroached upon the government land.

In Assam, the matters of identity and land are highly contentious where politics has historically centred around these issues.

Since 2016 the state under the rule by BJP has seen a spike in hatred against Muslim citizens who are demonised as illegal immigrants who have come from Bangladesh to take over the state.

However, the National Register of Citizens for Assam published in 2019 declared nearly 2 million people as stateless. Of these, the exercise, though highly controversial, found that about 1.6 million are Hindus of Bengali ethnicity. The theory that Muslim of Assam who constitute around 35% of the population are illegal immigrants fell flat with the results of NRC.

The BJP is however trying hard to keep the anti-Muslim politics around immigration afloat. It came with the Citizenship Amendment Act in December 2019 which grants citizenship to refugees from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh but excludes Muslims.

After his Kamrup rally, the Shah traveled to Silchar in Barak valley where he addressed another rally. “I assure you that refugees will be granted citizenship and infiltrators will be thrown out,” he told the crowd.

Shah’s comment came at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, to attend the 50th anniversary of the country’s National Day.

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