On Assam’s River Islands, Family Planning Clashes Against Religious Tradition

Courtesy of Nida Najar People aboard a boat on the Brahmaputra river in Assam.

MAZERCHAR CHALAKURA, Assam â€" On the banks of the Brahmaputra River, off the coast of Dhubri town in the northeastern state of Assam, lie a few hundred villages that seem stuck in time, difficult to reach from the mainland and undeveloped for decades.

These “char,” the name given to the more than 2,000 riverbank villages and river islands in Assam, are home to hundreds of thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims who use the fertile lands to cultivate paddy. They live in huts fashioned from dried jute, get around without roads and have few schools.

Jan Khatun lives in Mazerchar Chalakura, village accessible to mainland Assam only by boat, with her husband, a rickshaw puller in Dhubri. At 42, she has nine children, and her youngest daughter, who completed only the first grade, was married at 12 to a laborer from a neighboring village.

Forcing girls to get married at that age is illegal in India, but Mrs. Khatun said that local people had started telling her that her daughter was growing up and that it was time she was married. “I just wanted to fulfill my responsibility,” she said.

Courtesy of Nida Najar Jan Khatun with her children Badruddin, Mumita and Sonika in Assam.

Mazerchar is in the distri! ct of Dhubri, whose residents are mostly Muslims of Bengali origin. Many of the chars in Assam are islands in the Brahmaputra River and can disappear over time due to floods, just as regularly as new char islands form from silt deposits. Mazerchar is one of the several chars that are actually connected to the mainland. The district’s population has been growing rapidly: the growth rate of Dhubri, released last month by the Census of India, was 24.4 percent from 2001 to 2011, above the statewide average of 17.07 percent and the highest in Assam.

Health experts say a lack of education and family planning, as well as the common practice of child marriage, has the char population growing at a rate at which the eroding soil cannot support. And as different ethnic groups compete for ever-scarce land, a significant number of the Assamese are erroneously linking the growing numbers of Muslims to illegal immigration from Bangladesh, whch has been at the center of a volatile debate and has led to intense violence and forced displacement.

“People say they are coming from Bangladesh,” said Ilias Ali, director of the Global Hospital in Guwahati and a partner in the National Rural Health Mission’s quest to bring family planning to the chars. “But they are not Bangladeshis; they are from undivided Bengal. If we invest money to education and health facilities, their numbers will go down.”

Yet Dr. Ali acknowledges that the Muslim communities in the char areas are resistant to family planning efforts, particularly when he has tried to encourage the men to undergo no-scalpel vasectomies, a procedure that avoids the potential complications of a tubal ligation for women but remains extremely unpopular.

In 2010, along with the National Rural Health Mission, he organized a camp for tubal ligations and vasectomies in Hatsingimarie, in Dhubri district. Over 200 women and around 20 men underwent one of the procedures, a! ccording ! to his records. But only days later, he received word that the Dhubri faction of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind (Organization of Indian Islamic Scholars), a conservative organization of Indian Muslim clerics, had distributed fliers in a local mosque in Hatsingimarie forbidding imams to attend the last rites of the sterilized men.

The women are just as resistant to birth control methods, which aren’t widely available. There is a single clinic accessible by boat from Mrs. Khatun’s part of the village of Mazerchar, but the women rarely go, and there is no doctor present.

Accredited Social Health Activist workers and the clinic staff have been offering pills, condoms and intrauterine devices, also known as copper-T, to local women for the past two years. So far, only 13 women of the several thousand in the clinic’s jurisdiction have undergone the operation.

“People think that the copper will remain in their bodies after death, and their souls won’t go to heaven,” said Kalpana Ghosh, a nurse a the clinic.

Though the staff hopes to get 40 women each month to use birth control pills, family planning counseling or IUDs, Ms. Ghosh said she struggles to get six or seven.

Outside the chars, the ethnic Assamese also look upon the growing ranks of Muslims with concern, but not because they worried about their welfare. The Assamese see the char Muslims as outsiders, even though historians say that many of the char people settled in Assam as far back as the early 1900s, coming from East Bengal as part of a British policy to grow more food and cultivate land that was lying dormant.

“Due to erosion, flood and land loss, they migrate to the urban centers,” said Gorky Chakraborty, a professor at the Institute of Development Studies in Calcutta who has studies the char communities in Assam. “They proclaim themselves to be Assamese. But their language, their traits, their cultural ethos, is not similar to the people in the rest of Assam. Whenever they move to Guwahati, they are id! entified ! as Bangladeshis. “

Courtesy of Nida Najar The jute and paddy field at Mazerchar Chalakura in Assam.

The debate over the nationality of Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam, a large minority population in the state, came to the forefront last year when ethnic Bodos and Bengali-speaking Muslims clashed in Kokrajhar, north of Dhubri, over a land dispute.

Many blame the governing Congress Party and the All India United Democratic Front, an opposition group for failing to address the population growth problem in the chars. AIUDF is a political pary formed in 2006 by Badruddin Ajmal, a millionaire perfume magnate turned politician, who represents Dhubri in the Indian parliament and whose vote base is primarily the Muslims of Bengali origin. Though residents of the char communities do tend to vote in blocs, largely for the Congress Party or the AIUDF, which is part of the federal coalition government led by the Congress Party, that has translated to little development for the region.

In the meantime, char dwellers are as concerned about the scarcity of land as others in Assam. Though education and health indicators in chars are low, the younger couples seemed more inclined toward smaller families as shrinking land means that few could afford to support large families. Many had lost family land because of floods and had turned to manual labor as an alternative.

Liaquat Hussain is one of the wealthiest men in Mazerchar. His grandfather migrated from east Bengal in 1911, and so pleased a local zamindar, or feudal landlord, that he was ! eventuall! y awarded the land he tilled, which now amounts to 11 acres divided between eight brothers. Mr. Hussain owns a tractor, a fishery, and donated the land for the clinic.

His sons went to college and live in Dhubri, but as he sat under a tree bent with swollen jackfruit in front of his acres of paddy and jute, he conceded that the land that was the key to socioeconomic mobility for his grandfather and his father has run out.

“Now, the only option for Muslims of this place is sale of labor,” he said.

Rashida Begum, one of Mrs. Khatun’s neighbors, bemoans that fate. She complained that husband has no land to call his own and spends his time fixing up houses on the island for cash.

Sometimes, Mrs. Begum, her husband and their four children travel to Guwahati and Bihar and labor in brick factories for months to make ends meet the rest of the year.  Mrs. Begum, 30, has given up on chiding her children to go to school.

After Mrs. Begum married, her mother-in-law, who had only oneson, commanded her new daughter-in-law, then just a girl of 15, to give her 10 grandsons. But Mrs. Begum had other plans.

Standing outside her neighbor’s kitchen where a mound of rice dried in the scorching midday sun, she drew her 7-year-old boy, her fourth and youngest child, close to her.

“This one will be my last,” she said.

Nida Najar is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi. She reported with the help of a grant from the International Reporting Project.