BJP claims Muslims are marrying Adivasi women to grab land in Jharkhand. The claims don’t add up
Most women on a recently circulated list have either not married Muslim men, or do not have rights over their family property.
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On a cloudy morning in August, fields of freshly sown paddy stretched out for acres near Mayurkola panchayat in Jharkhand’s Sahibganj district. The village is on the border with West Bengal, and less than 35 km from Bangladesh.
Kapra Tudu, the mukhiya, or chief, of Mayurkola, was playing with her three young children, when we stopped by her house, just off the main road.
She was not surprised to see us. Mayurkola has been in the news since July 28. Speaking to reporters that day, Asha Lakra, a Bharatiya Janata Party politician and member of the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, listed it as one of the nine panchayats in Sahibganj where a total of ten Adivasi women elected representatives were married to “Bangladeshi infiltrators, Rohingya Muslims”.
While Lakra did not name any of the women, she did mention the posts they held – eight mukhiyas, including of Mayurkola, one panchayat samiti member and a zilla parishad chairperson.
Lakra was echoing what her party colleague and member of parliament, Nishikant Dubey, had said on the floor of the Lok Sabha. In his speech on July 25, Dubey had alleged that “Bangladeshi infiltrators” were marrying Adivasi women to grab their land and property, and to use them as proxies to...
