When Bulldozers Trample Verses: On Paddy, Poetry, and a Lost Conscience

A field of young paddy seedlings swaying in the wind — this is not merely an image of agriculture, but one of identity. A metaphor of Assam itself. But that metaphor was violently crushed yesterday under the roar of a bulldozer in Phukanhat Milon Nagar, Lakhimpur.
The video, captured by a young woman named Gungun Chetia, now resonates across Assam, shaking the conscience of those who still believe in empathy. A JCB tearing into green saplings — not weeds, not unlawful structures, but seedlings, the hope of a family’s future — was not just the flattening of a field. It was a brutal symbol of misplaced priorities and mechanical governance that forgets the human story buried in every furrow.

What makes this day even more haunting is its cruel coincidence: it is the death anniversary of Hiren Bhattacharya who once gave voice to this very land — its paddy fields, its mist-laden mornings, its green hush of memory. He wrote of soil not as property but as poetry. Of land not as numbers in government files but as lifelines passed down generations. How would he mourn today, seeing his verses made irrelevant in a single morning’s eviction drive?

There is something soul-wrenching about seeing seedlings—literal and symbolic—being bulldozed on a day before we remember a poet who celebrated the land as sacred. Assam deserves better than this paradox.

As Hiren Bhattacharya once wrote, "মই যেন সৰগ পৰা মানুহটো, সমুখত শস্যঘ্রাণহীন এখন পথাৰ...." Today, many in Phukanhat must feel exactly that — like strangers in their own land, left to gaze at a barren field where dreams once swayed green in the wind.
Gungun’s family has tilled that land since the time of her grandfather. They sowed late this year, mourning the death of a loved one — only to now mourn their paddy too. The eviction notice arrived just four days earlier. Their house may have survived the bulldozer, but their seedlings — helpless and harmless — were not spared. "They didn’t even spare our seedlings,” she said, her words echoing with a kind of pain that doesn’t need exaggeration to sting.

The administration may claim legality. They may call the land “VGR” — Village Grazing Reserve. They may even claim due process. But what due process begins at 5 AM and ends with people losing not just shelter, but sustenance? What legal framework crushes paddy while still letting others on the same land, supposedly with older pattas, stay untouched?

Yes, land rights must be regulated. Yes, encroachments need examination. But can we not distinguish between settlements and livelihoods? Between walls of cement and roots of rice? Between political slogans and poetic legacies?

There is something soul-wrenching about seeing seedlings—literal and symbolic—being bulldozed on the very day we remember a poet who celebrated the land as sacred. Assam deserves better than this paradox.

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