Assam, India <\/strong>\u2013 Akram Ali stood by the ruins of his four-room house under the scorching April heat, sifting through the debris where his life once stood.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was my home built more than 45 years ago,\u201d Ali, 50, said, his eyes tearing up. \u201cNow it\u2019s all rubble.\u201d<\/p>\n On the morning of March 14, bulldozers descended on Islampur, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in Bongora on the outskirts of Guwahati, the main city in the northeastern Indian state of Assam.<\/p>\n For the next four hours, more than three dozen bulldozers razed down homes, including Ali\u2019s, rendering 400 families homeless from 177 hectares (437 acres) of land allegedly protected for Assam\u2019s Indigenous people under a state government law.<\/p>\n Ali now lives in a makeshift tarpaulin shanty a few kilometres (miles) from his demolished home.<\/p>\n Playing a viral video of him crying inconsolably on his mobile phone, the daily wage worker told Al Jazeera his home, like others in Bongora, was demolished despite his Indigenous identity.<\/p>\n \u201cI am Goriya, son of the soil, but my home was still flattened,\u201d Ali said. \u201cIt was my entire life\u2019s hard work.\u201d<\/p>\n The Goriyas are an Assamese-speaking Muslim community mostly settled in the tea belt of eastern Assam. They are one of the five subgroups of Muslim communities \u2013 along with Moriya, Syed, Deshi and Julha \u2013 recognised by the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as native or Indigenous to the state in 2022.<\/p>\n These communities have enjoyed a sense of safety over their cultural and ethnic identity, being distinct from the Bengali-speaking Muslims, who for decades have been labelled \u201coutsiders\u201d, \u201cinfiltrators\u201d or \u201cillegal migrants\u201d \u2013 even though most of these families have lived here for more than seven decades.<\/p>\n Muslims constitute more than a third of Assam\u2019s 31 million population, according to the last census conducted in 2011 \u2013 the highest among all Indian states. Of them, nearly 6.3 million are Bengali-speaking Muslims \u2013 pejoratively called \u201cmiyas\u201d\u00a0\u2013 while about 4 million Muslims are considered \u201cIndigenous\u201d to the land.<\/p>\n It is this last set of Muslims that Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been reaching out to in advance of Thursday\u2019s legislative assembly election in Assam, where the party has been in power since 2016 and is now eyeing a third consecutive term.<\/p>\n As Assam\u2019s Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma \u2013 a divisive 57-year-old politician who has been heading the BJP\u2019s crackdown on the \u201cmiyas\u201d since he assumed office in 2021 \u2013 ramps up his outreach to the Indigenous Muslims, the community members, including Ali, question whether the distinction between them and Bengali-speaking Muslims offers any real protection.<\/p>\n \u201cWeren\u2019t our homes demolished because we are Muslims?\u201d asked Ali.<\/p>\n Sarma and his party have repeatedly assured Indigenous Muslims that only \u201cmiyas\u201d are the targets of the government\u2019s crackdown, which in recent years has included eviction from lands, demolition of homes, erasure of their names from electoral rolls, and even arrests, detentions and expulsion to Bangladesh, their alleged homeland.<\/p>\n Sarma has frequently emphasised that his government will \u201cnever target\u201d Indigenous Assamese Muslims with such exclusionary policies.<\/p>\n Addressing a rally on March 6 in eastern Assam, Sarma claimed Indigenous Muslims \u201csupport the BJP\u201d. The Assam BJP\u2019s Vice President Aparaajitaa Bhuyan told Al Jazeera the party is eyeing as many votes from Assamese Muslims as possible.<\/p>\n At the same time, Chief Minister Sarma has made clear that the BJP\u2019s outreach to Muslims of Assamese ancestry does not extend to Bengali-origin Muslims. \u201cThe BJP does not need \u2018miya\u2019 votes for another 10 years,\u201d Sarma recently said.<\/p>\n Bonojit Hussain, a political analyst from Assam, told Al Jazeera that Sarma\u2019s outreach to Assam\u2019s Indigenous Muslims is motivated by two factors: One, the BJP wants to dilute its communal image, and two, the party wants the votes of Assamese Muslims in constituencies where both the Indigenous Muslims and Hindus call the shots.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the BJP stokes up anti-Muslim sentiment and drives a wedge between the Hindus and Muslims, then it will puncture the social fabric between them,\u201d Hussain said. \u201cSuch a communal manoeuvre from the BJP may backfire as Assamese Hindus and Muslims, except for the religion, share the same culture.\u201d<\/p>\n Hussain pointed out that the right-wing party is targeting constituencies in northern and eastern Assam where the number of Assamese Muslim voters ranges from 30,000 to 50,000, a decisive figure to sway the vote in an assembly constituency.<\/p>\n \u201cTake, for example, the Nalbari legislative constituency with over 1,95,100 voters. Assamese Muslims contribute over 25 percent of the vote share there,\u201d Hussain said.<\/p>\n In Barkhetri, another assembly seat in northern Assam, of the 2,17,028 voters, about 80,000 are Assamese Muslims.<\/p>\n The stakes are even higher for the BJP in mainly Assamese-speaking eastern Assam, colloquially called the Upper Assam region.<\/p>\n Upper Assam-based journalist Firoz Khan told Al Jazeera that Indigenous Muslims decide the election in seven or eight of the 39 seats in the region. \u201cWith Assamese Muslims being key to these seats, the BJP has toned down its communal politics in the region and is continuously trying to woo the Assamese Muslims,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Indigenous Muslim groups say that while some within the community could vote for the BJP and its regional ally, the Asom Gana Parishad, because of their 2022 recognition of their community as Indigenous, a majority of them are unlikely to be swayed.<\/p>\n Moinul Islam, spokesman for the Indigenous Assamese rights-based organisation, Sadou Asom Goria Jatiya Parishad, told Al Jazeera the BJP\u2019s exclusionary policies towards Muslims will not persuade the Indigenous Muslims to help Sarma win a third term for the BJP.<\/p>\n Before the demolition drive in Bongora, where Ali lost his home, the government in July and August last year also evicted hundreds of \u201cgoriyas\u201d from alleged government land in Lakhimpur and Golaghat districts. The BJP\u2019s drive to file false objections against Muslim names in the voter list also affected thousands of Goriya Muslims.<\/p>\n BJP spokesman Kishore Upadhyay, however, denied such allegations. \u201cAny allegations of Assamese Muslims being evicted and pushed across to Bangladesh is malicious, biased and politically motivated,\u201d he told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n Indigenous Muslim groups also say the BJP is attempting to erase their cultural identity and legacy, as a resurgent and violent Hindu supremacist ideology dominates Assam, eroding the safety cushion they once enjoyed.<\/p>\n In the run-up to the polls last month, Sarma changed the name of the only medical college in Assam, named after a Goriya Muslim, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, in Assam\u2019s Barpeta district.<\/p>\n Ahmed was a prominent freedom fighter during India\u2019s independence movement against the British. In the 1970s, he served as the country\u2019s first president from the state, and the third Muslim president in all.<\/p>\n Sarma justified the name change by claiming all medical colleges in Assam are named after the area in which they are located, though he later said \u201canother educational or cultural institution of the same or higher stature\u201d could be named to honour Ahmed.<\/p>\n In December last year, Sarma suggested dehyphenating Sankar-Azan, which combines the names of 15th-century Assamese polymath Srimanta Sankardev and Azan Peer, a 17th-century Sufi saint, who together symbolised Assam\u2019s syncretic history.<\/p>\n Isfaqur Rahman, a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Assam, said the BJP government\u2019s \u201cHindu nationalism is slowly erasing the legacy of Assamese Muslims\u201d.<\/p>\n He pointed out how the chief minister called the 16th-century warrior Ismail Siddique, popularly known as Bagh Hazarika, a \u201cfictional character\u201d and asked for proof of his existence. Siddique is recorded in local history as a legendary Indigenous general who fought with a Hindu ruler to resist the Mughal advances in the region.<\/p>\n Responding to allegations that the BJP was erasing the cultural legacy of Assam\u2019s Indigenous Muslims, spokesman Upadhyay said they were a \u201cpolitically motivated narrative designed to mislead\u201d the people.<\/p>\n But back in Bongora, Ali said his conscience does not now allow him to vote for the BJP.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter we were evicted, the chief minister said we are illegal immigrants. He has already broken our backbones by demolishing our homes,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are the new miyas.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Assam, India \u2013 Akram Ali stood by the ruins of his four-room house under the scorching April heat, sifting through the debris where his life once stood. \u201cThis was my home built more than 45 years ago,\u201d Ali, 50, said, his eyes tearing up. \u201cNow it\u2019s all rubble.\u201d On the morning of March 14, bulldozers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Akram](\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_4219.Akram-Ali-stood-by-the-ruins-of-his-four-room-home-under-scorching-heat.-Arshad_Al-Jazeera-copy-1775562063.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C513&quality=80\")
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/The-ruins-of-Akram-Ali-an-indigenous-Muslims-home-in-Bongora.-Arshad-Ahmed_Al-Jazeera-copy-1775562075.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C514&quality=80\")
What\u2019s behind BJP\u2019s outreach?<\/h2>\n
![\"Three](\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Three-indigenous-Muslims-among-the-4-million-clad-in-Assamese-traditional-attire.-Arshad-Ahmed_Al-Jazeera-copy-1775562079.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C514&quality=80\")
\u2018Erasing our legacy\u2019<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"