Dhubri Is Just the Beginning: How Assam is Being Redrawn for Corporate Rule

Bonojit Hussain

A Wall of Dust Precedes Bulldozer

What is unfolding in Dhubri district is not merely the eviction of thousands of families—it is a declaration of intent. A massive eviction drive is now underway, ostensibly to clear land for an Adani thermal power plant. Villagers in Chapar and Alomganj, many holding ryoti pattas or living on floodplains for decades, are being uprooted overnight. Protesters have been detained. Bulldozers and police cordons are doing what courts  never did: wipe communities off the map.

According to media reports, over 2,500 families have already been evicted in what is being described as one of the largest such operations in Assam's recent history.

This is not the last eviction. It is merely one of the first.

A Grid of Extraction and Control

Zoom out, and the Dhubri eviction aligns with a larger pattern. Within less than a month of the Geological Survey of India confirming an estimated 18.29 million tonnes of iron ore deposits in Dhubri's Chandardinga region, the Assam government proposed a permanent Army camp in the same district—officially to manage 'communal tensions'. On its own, a security installation to maintain public order might seem routine. Yet the fact that heavy military infrastructure is being proposed in the very district where a large, newly mapped iron ore deposit now awaits auction is difficult to ignore. While officially unrelated, the proposed military camp and recent mineral valuation in Dhubri appear to be unfolding in tandem—a coincidence too strategic to overlook.

A 19-km, Rs. 5,000 crore four-lane bridge over the Brahmaputra—connecting Dhubri with Phulbari in Meghalaya—is also nearing completion. In 2023, the Dhubri river terminal was commissioned as part of the central government's inland waterways strategy. Together, these projects are turning Dhubri into a logistical and possible military chokepoint—where evictions today clear the ground for strategic infrastructure tomorrow.

Coal and Thermal Ambitions

The Dhubri 'clearances' are not an isolated event. They are part of a wider thermal push—fossil-fuel extraction as a territorial strategy. Just 50 kilometres east, in Kokrajhar’s Parbatjhora subdivision, a storm brewed. Here, the proposed Adani–APDCL coal-fired power plant has triggered  tensions. In mid-June 2025, hundreds of Bodo villagers physically blocked government and corporate survey teams after learning that approximately 3,400 bighas (about 1,120 acres) of agricultural land, forests, and grazing commons were quietly earmarked for acquisition.

The Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR) authorities—operating without meaningful consultation—claimed the land was “vacant.” But for the farmers and forest users of the villages, this “vacancy” is their home, their rice fields, and their collective lifeworld. Civil society groups have since accused the administration of violating the Forest Rights Act and the right to free, prior, and informed consent under Indian environmental law. Villagers allege they were not only bypassed but actively misled.

In the face of mounting backlash, reports soon emerged that the government was considering shifting the proposed plant to Bilasipara in Dhubri district. Whether relocated or not, the trajectory remains clear: this is not about providing energy access to remote villages. It is about energy control. It is about enclosing Assam’s rivers, forests, and farmlands into extractive zones—run by private actors, backed by state power, and greenlit through silence or force.

Weaponising Ethno-Communal Faultlines

Much of the public narrative—especially among Assamese ultra-nationalist circles—is hailing the Dhubri evictions as a crackdown on "illegal immigrants." Social media is flooded with videos of bulldozed homes and anti-Miya slogans. Yet the vast majority of evictees are poor cultivators, many of whom have lived on this land for over 60 years. What is unfolding is not law enforcement—it is state-backed dispossession.

And yet, instead of interrogating this larger design, some organisations and intellectuals claiming to represent Miya communities end up reinforcing the ethno-communal façade that the state so carefully maintains. By constantly playing the victimhood card without analysing the underlying political economy, they help narrow the lens through which the crisis is understood. National media houses, often unwittingly, echo this framing—treating the evictions as a communal issue rather than a systemic one.

But this communal spin is not accidental; it is functional. It reframes corporate land grabs as ethnic justice or injustice. It fragments resistance. It creates just enough confusion to let the bulldozers roll in while society argues over who "deserves" to be evicted.

Make no mistake—today it is Miya cultivators. Tomorrow, it will be Karbi peasants in rare-earth-rich hills, then Bodo households resisting a thermal plant in Parbatjhora/Basbari in BTR; and then Tai-Ahom, Mishing, and Chutiya villagers standing in the path of palm oil and hydropower corridors in eastern Assam.

If anyone believes their ethnicity will shield them, they are mistaken. The bulldozer does not discriminate—it simply follows the new corporate cartography, drafted in government offices and sanctified by silence.

The Politics of Eviction in Historical Perspective

To fully grasp the violence of the present moment, one must place it within Assam’s longer history of land regimes—shaped by both colonial expediency and post-colonial inertia. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the British classified vast swathes of Indigenous and community-held landscapes as “wastelands,” encouraging settlement by Bengali Muslim cultivators from East Bengal to boost agrarian revenue. These interventions not only undermined customary land tenure systems but also introduced the bureaucratic fiction of terra nullius into the river valleys and forest tracts.

But if colonialism initiated this land entanglement, post-colonial India and successive state governments in Assam did nothing to disentangle it. The Land Policies of 1972, 1989, and 2019 largely continued earlier approaches—focusing on selective regularisation of settlements while avoiding a comprehensive cadastral survey that could have clarified land titles across the board. As a result, large sections of the rural poor—including plains tribes (many of whom were repeatedly displaced under colonial administration), shifting cultivators in the hills, Santhals, tea tribes and Miya Muslims —remain landless or ambiguously titled.

In today’s Assam, this structural ambiguity has become a tool. It enables the state to weaponise legality—targeting whichever group is politically convenient under the shifting signposts of ethnicity, ecology, or development. Eviction is no longer the exception; it is governance by other means.

Assam Redrawn for Corporations

Assam is being quietly but systematically redrawn—not by elected assemblies, but by corporate cartographers. The GSI’s 2025 Handbook, titled Geological Potential of Northeast India: A hidden trove of mineral prospect beneath majestic landscape, identifies dozens of auction-ready blocks across the region. In Dima Hasao, nearly 1,500 million tonnes of limestone. In Karbi Anglong, over 28 million tonnes of rare-earth-bearing syenite. In Nagaon, 4 million tonnes of silica sand.

But the real violence is not in the tonnage—it is in the erasure. Nowhere do these documents mention the people living on these lands. Nowhere do they acknowledge Sixth Schedule protections, forest rights, or customary laws. These are not just figures. They are coordinates of dispossession.

In eastern Assam, pilot palm-oil plantations are being established across thousands of hectares in Lakhimpur and Dhemaji—zones historically used by Mishing communities for fishing and flood-recession agriculture. Though licences have been issued quietly, the expansion already threatens to transform traditional commons into monoculture estates. Between coal, iron ore and thermal corridors in the west, critical minerals in the hills, and palm oil estates in the east, Assam is being cleaved into corporate zones.

Infrastructure Does Not Arrive in a Vacuum

None of this plunder can occur without infrastructure. Multiple new railheads are being constructed including in Arunachal Pradesh where "critical minerals" like vanadium and Rare-Earth Elements have been found, mapped and made auction-ready ; along with a renewed focus on river and road logistics connecting coal and limestone belts to the national grid. The Trans-Arunachal Highway and the ongoing highway network expansions in Assam are part of the same logic: open the frontier, secure the roads, and extract what lies beneath.

In neoliberal times, infrastructure is not neutral. It decides what gets connected—and who gets displaced. It facilitates extraction under the garb of connectivity.

This Is Not a Transition, It Is a Conquest

The language of development has always cloaked the logic of conquest. But rarely has the mask slipped so brazenly. The Dhubri eviction is not an isolated event—it is a pilot for a new Assam. An Assam where resistance is branded 'communal', where bulldozers arrive before consent, and where minerals and megawatts matter more than citizens.

This is no benign developmental utopia. It is extractive despotism, redrawing the map in corporate ink. But the story is not yet finished. From the banks of the Brahmaputra to the ridgelines of Karbi Anglong, what happens next depends on who stands up—and how. The future of Assam will not be written in government tenders or investor road shows, but in the acts of those who refuse to be erased.

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Bonojit Hussain is a full-time farmer and an independent researcher based in Baridatara village, Nalbari district, Assam.