ABSTRACT
In the clashes of January 1979 too, the population on the Assam side who suffered comprised a large number of these plains tribal people. The Assam government has strongly repudiated such allegations; and sources in Assam in turn accuse powerful, ethnically Naga interests in Nagaland itself of encouraging encroachments on the Assam side and later claiming these areas as Nagaland’s own. Sugarcane to feed the distillery in Dimapur, for instance, is grown by virtually bonded ‘encroachers’ as a captive crop in substantial areas on the Nagaland–Assam boundary. The demand has acquired a shrill urgency following the policy decision of the Assam government declaring all encroachments made after 1 January 1980, ‘illegal’. Underlying all these demands are the still relatively dormant tensions over agricultural land which are a feature of agrarian relations in Assam. The government has been engaged in the eviction of encroachers on forest land in the Daranga area in the Tamulpur block on the Assam–Bhutan border.
