The Constitutional Questions Over Assam's 'Exclusionary' Heritage Land Bill

What does preserving demography mean in a Heritage Bill?

(Image: Erum Gour/The Quint)

A heritage law ordinarily tells us what cannot be built, excavated, or damaged around a protected site. Assam’s new land Bill does something more unusual. It asks who may acquire or possess land around that site—and how old that person’s family connection to the locality must be.

The Assam Land and Revenue Regulation (Amendment) Bill, 2026, passed by the Assembly on 29 July, does not confine its purpose to protecting old institutions from encroachment or physical damage. Its preamble also seeks to maintain the “culture, heritage and demography” of the surrounding area. 

What does preserving demography mean in a Heritage Bill? Does it protect communities historically connected with an institution from dispossession? Or does it permit the State to decide which citizens form part of an area’s legitimate population and which represent demographic change?

Assam has genuine reasons to protect its ancient sattras, namghars, temples, mosques and cultural landscapes. It also has a difficult history of migration, ethnic conflict and anxieties over the loss of indigenous land.

But those circumstances demand greater constitutional care—not less—when ancestry becomes relevant to access to land.

What Is the Bill Really Protecting?

The Bill permits the government to declare the territory within a five-kilometre radius of an “iconic heritage institution” a protected heritage area. The institution must be at least 250 years old, possess archaeological, historical, aesthetic or cultural significance, and reflect the State’s socio-cultural and religious ethos. 

Within the notified territory, the Bill restricts acquisition or possession through transfer, exchange, lease, agreement or settlement. The provision is awkwardly drafted: it does not clearly explain when original-inhabitant status is sufficient, when government approval may permit a transaction, or what standards will guide that approval.

Yet the Bill itself lays down no construction limits, architectural controls, environmental safeguards, mandatory expert assessments or institution-specific conservation plans. Its principal instruments are controls over land transactions, a genealogical test and a power of eviction. 

A five-kilometre radius may encompass villages, agricultural fields, markets and homes far beyond an institution’s immediate boundary. If physical conservation is the objective, why would narrower restrictions on construction, commercial development and speculative acquisition not address the danger more directly?

The presence of “demography” in the preamble makes this question impossible to dismiss. The Bill is concerned not only with what happens to the heritage institution, but also with who inhabits the land around it.

How Does a Family Become ‘Original’

The 2026 definition is substantially more specific than the formulation proposed in 2024. The earlier Bill defined an original inhabitant as a person whose family had lived in the area for three generations before the commencement of the legislation. The new Bill instead fixes 1 January 2006 as the endpoint and defines one generation as 25 years of “continuous living”. 

On a plain reading, the new formula appears to require a family connection extending approximately 75 years backwards from 2006—to around 1931. But why 1931?

This is not a citizenship law, and the Assam Accord’s 24 March 1971 cut-off does not govern land regulation. Nevertheless, in a State where 1971 remains the best-known political boundary in disputes over migration and belonging, a test reaching four decades further into the colonial period requires a clear justification. 

The test is also intensely local. A family may have lived in Assam for generations but fail because its ancestors resided outside the particular protected territory. Because 1 January 2006 is a fixed endpoint, a family that settled in the area later cannot become “original” merely through decades—or even future generations—of residence.

The Bill thus creates more than a residence qualification. It constructs a largely closed genealogical category.

Can a River Break 'Continuous Living'?

The Bill does not explain what evidence will establish continuous residence. Nor does it say how the authorities will treat changing village boundaries, informal tenancies, marriage, lost records or involuntary displacement.

That silence has particular significance in Assam. The State’s Water Resources Department records that more than 4.27 lakh hectares have been lost to erosion by the Brahmaputra and its tributaries since 1950. It also estimates an average annual loss of nearly 8,000 hectares, with new areas affected every year. 

A family may be forced to move from one char to another, from an eroded village to government land, or from a rural settlement to an urban edge without severing its historical relationship with Assam.

A family may remain rooted in Assam even when the land on which it lived no longer exists.

Applied mechanically, “continuous living” could turn displacement by a river into evidence of insufficient belonging. Families with stable property and intact records will find the test easier. Those repeatedly forced to relocate may bear a burden created by geography rather than choice.

Rules may eventually explain how such cases will be treated. But when the ability to acquire land depends on ancestry, these safeguards should not be left entirely to later administrative discretion.

Who Receives the State’s Assurance?

The Bill does not settle the wider and long-contested question of who is “Assamese”. Clause 6 of the Assam Accord promised safeguards for the cultural, social and linguistic identity and heritage of the “Assamese people”, while official records show that the preparation of a definition has remained under consideration.

The Bill nevertheless gives material consequences to selected ideas of originality and indigeneity.

Its acquisition and eviction provisions must be distinguished. For future land transactions, the original-inhabitant requirement appears to operate generally, although its relationship with prior governmental approval is unclear.

The express differentiation occurs in the eviction clause. The District Commissioner may remove unauthorised occupants from protected heritage territory, except persons belonging to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, the Moran, Matak, Chutia, Koch Rajbanshi and Ahom communities, or specified disadvantaged groups, including tea and Adivasi communities. 

This protection does not confer ownership. Nor does it clearly release those communities from every restriction on acquiring land. It does, however, distribute legal security differently: some groups receive an express statutory shield from the Bill’s new eviction power, while others do not.

What Principle Explains This Selection?

In 2022, the Assam government officially identified Goriya, Moriya, Deshi, Jolha and Syed as indigenous Assamese Muslim communities. Their omission does not by itself establish discrimination. But it requires an explanation: why does the State’s recognition of these communities as indigenous Assamese Muslims not carry into a land Bill that expressly names other ethnic communities for protection from its new eviction power? 

This is not merely a question of nomenclature. Statutory classification determines which communities receive an express shield from the new eviction power and which remain dependent upon the general framework or future executive notification.

When Neutral Rules Produce Unequal Burdens

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has described the measure as secular, arguing that an original inhabitant may be Hindu or Muslim. The Bill does not contain an express religious prohibition. That must be acknowledged. 

But formal neutrality cannot end the inquiry.

In Lt Col Nitisha v Union of India, the Supreme Court explained that apparently neutral criteria may impose unequal burdens when they operate upon groups placed differently by history and social conditions. Equality therefore requires attention not only to the words of a rule, but also to its effects. 

That does not prove in advance that this Bill is discriminatory. Its rules and implementation will matter. But, it requires us to ask who can realistically prove residence reaching approximately to 1931; who possesses formal title and stable records; whose family history has been interrupted by erosion, poverty or displacement; and who is more likely to lack formal title and consequently be treated as an unauthorised occupant.

These questions are especially important for Bengali-origin Muslims, although they are not the only people who may be affected. Assam’s Muslim population is not one uniform category: indigenous Assamese Muslim communities and Bengali-origin Muslim communities possess different histories and political locations.

The concern is not that the Bill expressly excludes Muslims. It is that a neutral ancestry requirement will operate in a setting where Bengali-origin Muslim communities are repeatedly associated with migration, encroachment and demographic change, and where reporting has documented their displacement through numerous eviction drives.

Land insecurity does not itself remove the right to vote. But it can deepen civic marginalisation by weakening residential stability, livelihood, documentary security and a community’s ability to claim an equal place in public life.

A separate Assam procedure also subjects land transfers between persons of different religions to additional governmental and police scrutiny. The Special Branch may examine fraud or coercion, the source of funds, the transaction’s possible effect on social cohesion, and its national security implications.

That procedure and the Heritage Bill are legally distinct. Read together, however, they compel a larger question: when does verification of title become governmental supervision of socially acceptable settlement?

What Would Proportionate Protection Look Like?

The State may protect heritage, prevent unlawful encroachment and respond to genuine indigenous anxieties about land alienation. But a legitimate objective does not make every method proportionate.

Why should a notified heritage territory extend across such a wide radius? Why was 1 January 2006 selected? What evidence will prove continuous residence? What criteria will govern government approval? Why are particular communities expressly shielded while others await notification? What notice, hearing and appeal will precede eviction?

A more proportionate framework could require independent heritage assessments and institution-specific boundaries. It could impose neutral construction and land-use controls, prevent speculative acquisition, prescribe transparent standards for governmental permission, and guarantee fair procedures before eviction. It could also recognise erosion-induced displacement instead of treating mobility as a failure of belonging.

None of this requires Assam to abandon the protection of its cultural inheritance. It requires the State to connect the restriction imposed upon citizens more closely to the harm it claims to prevent.

Heritage does not survive only in buildings. It survives in communities, memories and relationships with land. Assam is entitled to protect that inheritance. But conservation becomes constitutionally troubling when the State seeks to preserve demography by sorting citizens according to ancestry, documentation and officially assigned community categories.

The decisive question is not merely whether a Muslim may satisfy the definition of an original inhabitant. It is why any citizen’s access to land within a notified heritage area should depend upon a family history apparently reaching to 1931, why selected groups receive an express shield from eviction, and why so much remains dependent on records and executive discretion.

A government may protect an ancient institution. It should not, in doing so, turn ancestry into a permanent licence to belong.

(Sahil Hussain Choudhury is an advocate and constitutional law researcher based in New Delhi. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are personal. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)