GuwahatiAssam’s Bharatiya Janata Party won 82 of 126 seats on pledges to clear Muslim-majority char islands.
India’s ruling party describes the policy as land reclamation from chars — river islands with largely Muslim populations.
Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma pledged 165,000 more acres cleared and tea wages raised to ₹500.
Sources: Hindustan Times, BBC, Economic Times
WHAT A CHAR IS
Chars are shifting river islands in the Brahmaputra — silt deposits that appear, disappear, and migrate with the monsoon. Roughly 2,500 of them exist across Assam, home to an estimated 2.5 million people, overwhelmingly Bengali-origin Muslims who farm the fertile silt between floods.
THE PARTITION INHERITANCE
Assam sat on the front line of the 1947 partition. The province lost Sylhet to East Pakistan by referendum but inherited a Bengali-Muslim population whose ancestors had been encouraged to migrate by the British in the early 1900s to cultivate the Brahmaputra floodplain — the same chars now framed as encroachment.
THE 1985 CUTOFF
The Assam Accord, signed after a six-year nativist movement that killed over 800 people, set March 24, 1971 as the cutoff date: anyone who could not prove their family lived in Assam before that date is a foreigner. This is the only Indian state with its own citizenship cutoff, four decades earlier than the national 1948 line.
THE NRC AND CAA TRAP
The 2019 National Register of Citizens excluded 1.9 million Assam residents — many of them Hindu, not Muslim, which the BJP found politically inconvenient. The Citizenship Amendment Act then created a path back for non-Muslim excludees from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, while leaving Muslims to detention tribunals.
THE EVICTION PLAYBOOK
'Clearing' a char means demolishing homes, often without the notice or compensation Indian land law requires. Sarma's first term saw operations at Dholpur, Gorukhuti, and Sipajhar, with police firing at protesters in 2021. The cleared land is then reallocated as government farms or reserved for indigenous communities.
THE TEA WAGE
Assam grows roughly half of India's tea on plantations whose labor system descends directly from British indenture — workers from Jharkhand and Odisha brought in the 1860s and never repatriated. Daily wages of ₹250 (now pledged to rise to ₹500) sit below the state's own minimum wage; the gap is litigated, ignored, and renegotiated every election.