“There are no refugees in this house. Only dreams. And now even those are buried.”

This was the whispered lament of a Miya Muslim father as bulldozers reduced his home to dust. He had no illegal documents, no foreign ancestry, no political power. All he had was his name, Rahimuddin, and his crime, it seems, was being born a Miya in modern Assam.

What does it mean when belonging itself becomes dangerous? When the language you speak, the soil you till, and the prayers you offer become evidence of criminality?

In Assam today, bulldozers have become the state’s vocabulary, spoken not in courtrooms but on the ground, not through justice but through force. The Miya Muslims, a marginalized Bengali-speaking Muslim community, are living proof of what happens when a state decides that some of its people are less than others.

The Manufactured Crisis: Encroachers, Infiltrators, Enemies

The word “encroacher” is thrown around like a legal term, but in Assam, it has become a political weapon.

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has repeatedly warned that Assamese Hindus may become a minority within the next decade, blaming illegal immigration and demographic shifts. These claims, often unverified, have been used to justify mass evictions across districts like Darrang, Barpeta, and Nagaon regions with a high population of Miya Muslims.

According to the Assam government, 1.29 lakh bighas of land have been “freed” in recent years, with another 29 lakh bighas marked for eviction. What goes unspoken is the human cost. Behind every decimal lies a family. A story. A shattered life.

By branding entire communities as “infiltrators” despite generations of settled life, electoral participation, and cultural integration, the state has transformed citizens into suspects, voters into enemies, and homes into targets.

Bulldozer as Policy, Hatred as Performance

What used to be court orders and legal processes are now replaced with spectacle. Bulldozers move in like soldiers. Cameras follow. Politicians tweet. And a message is sent: “You are not welcome here.”

Assam’s Chief Minister has gone on record saying, “We will continue our bulldozing drive.” Such language is not administrative, it is militant. It reduces governance to brute strength, to a performance of power, often aimed at those least able to resist.

Bulldozers are meant to clear land, but in Assam, they are used to clear memory, identity, and dissent.

And the people they crush are not criminals. They are some of India’s poorest citizens: daily wage labourers, marginal farmers, fishermen, and orphans. Most live in fragile homes built over decades, with no access to formal land titles, because the system never recognized them to begin with.

From Margins to Targets: Who Are the Miya Muslims?

The Miya Muslims are not a monolith. They are a diverse, culturally rich, linguistically Assamese community with roots going back generations. Many trace their history to migration during British rule, when the colonial government encouraged settlement for expanding agriculture in the Brahmaputra valley.

Today, they are among the most economically backward communities in Assam, and yet, they are painted as dominant, invasive, and dangerous.

The term “Miya” has itself become a derogatory label. Miya poets who use their dialect to express their lived realities are trolled, arrested, or accused of separatism. Miya activists who protest eviction are labelled “anti-national.” Even silence becomes suspicion.

This is textbook dehumanization:

• First, label them.
• Then isolate them.
• Then displace them.
• And finally erase them legally, culturally, and physically.

The Political Theatre of Fear

Let us not be naïve. This is not just about land, it is about votes.

In a polarized electoral landscape, where Hindu-Muslim narratives dominate headlines, the Miya Muslims are the perfect scapegoat. Poor. Voiceless. Misunderstood. Easily “othered.”

By presenting their displacement as a fight to protect “Assamese identity,” the ruling establishment consolidates majority votes while diverting attention from issues like poverty, unemployment, health crises, and infrastructure collapse.

Even more chilling is the normalization of hate. Leaders speak in open hostility. Officials justify violence. Bureaucracies act as weapons, not protectors. And all the while, the public, tired, uninformed, or afraid, watches in silence.

This isn’t just undemocratic.

It is an assault on the very idea of India.

Dhalpur: The Day Humanity Was Flattened

Perhaps no image better captures this than what happened in Dhalpur in 2021.

During an eviction drive, a 12-year-old boy, Sheikh Farid, was shot dead. His body lay lifeless in the mud. Moments later, a photographer embedded with the police jumped on the corpse and kept stomping.

The footage was horrifying. It should have led to mass protests, court action, and national mourning. Instead, it faded in a day. As if the body of a Miya boy was not worthy of grief. As if his death was simply part of “the policy.”

That image was more than violence. It was a message that dignity, too, can be bulldozed.

Global Silence and National Shame

How is it that an entire community can be targeted so systematically, and the world stays quiet?

Where are the international human rights watchdogs?

Where is the global media that writes volumes on Palestine, Uyghurs, and Rohingyas?

Why is there no UN inquiry, no amnesty report, no global solidarity march?

The answer is brutal: Miya Muslims are not politically convenient victims.

They do not fit the profile of the “ideal oppressed.” Their story is complex. Their history is messy. And their erasure is being conducted by a democratic state, India, which many are unwilling to confront.

But let this essay be their voice.

Let the world know: a slow ethnic cleansing is underway without the bombs, but with bulldozers. Without camps, but with permanent camps of displacement. Without open war, but with institutional war against identity.

India’s Brain Drain of Humanity

It’s important to zoom out, too.

While the state hunts the vulnerable, India is losing its best minds. As the government bulldozes homes in Assam, young Indians, even from elite institutions like IITs and AIIMS, are leaving the country in droves.

According to the MEA, over 2.5 million Indians have renounced their citizenship since 2011. Many are highly educated doctors, engineers, scientists, tired of corruption, disillusioned by divisive politics, or simply unwilling to live in a country that no longer values talent over identity.

We are not just facing brain drain, we are facing conscience drain.

A nation that targets its poor and pushes out its brilliant cannot stand as a global superpower. It can build highways. It can host summits. But it cannot lead because it has lost moral legitimacy.

Memory, Resistance, and the Will to Remain

Despite it all, the Miya community refuses to disappear.

Through poetry, prayer, protests, and perseverance, they are reclaiming their voice. Writers like Hafiz Ahmed and activists like Inamul Haque are reminding India and the world that to be a Miya is not a crime, it is an identity. A legacy. A truth.

Miya students top the exams. Miya's mothers build shelters from bamboo and hope. Miya farmers return to the floodplains to sow again, even if they don’t know if their home will survive the next monsoon.

Hope, however, refuses to die.

In poetry written in Miya dialect, in youth-led legal petitions, in grassroots solidarity movements, the Miya community is fighting for survival with dignity. Not with violence, but with verse. Not with hatred, but with hope.

As one Miya poet wrote:

They call me illegal, even though I was born here.
They call my language foreign, even though it sings their rivers.
But I am still here, broken, breathing, and unafraid.
Their will to remain is their rebellion.

Their poetry is their resistance.

Their survival is their verdict against every lie spoken about them.

Conclusion: Bulldozers Cannot Erase Humanity

You can demolish a house, but not the love inside it.

You can flatten a field, but not the faith that planted it.

You can erase a name from a voter list, but not from history.

The Miya Muslims of Assam are not “illegal.” They are not “encroachers.” They are not “others.” They are India. And every bulldozer that crushes their dreams also cracks the foundation of our Constitution.

The world must listen. India must listen. Assam must listen.

Because you cannot build unity by bulldozing diversity.

You cannot create peace by spreading fear.

And you cannot silence a people by erasing their homes.

They will rebuild.

They will remember.

And the world, someday, will remember with them.

.    .    .