New Delhi: Since singer Zubeen Garg passed away in Singapore on September 19, thousands of people have been streaming into his Guwahati residence to pay their respects to the beloved icon.

On September 28, a day before his immediate family was to conduct the tenth-day rituals after his passing, an usual person visited Garg’s residence in the city’s Kahilipara area – someone whom neither his family and his huge fanbase nor the state’s general public had expected — business tycoon Gautam Adani and his son Jeet. 

Adani also posted about his visit on X.

Since then, social media in the northeastern state has been abuzz with speculation, mostly in Assamese language, surrounding the surprise visit by the Gujarati business tycoon who is closely linked to prime minister Narendra Modi. 

Pressure on the government

The situation after Garg’s death has been one of intense emotion. Thousands have come to the streets too more than once to demand that the circumstances that had led to his death by drowning in Singapore during a yacht trip be probed. 

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in the state has had to bow down to pressure and on September 25, formed a special investigation team (SIT) to probe the matter. Thus far though, the Himanta Biswa Sarma government has not been able to bring to the state the two persons who people have been demanding be brought to the books — Garg’s manager Siddharth Sharma and the organiser of the Northeast Festival in Singapore, Shyamkanu Mahanta, on whose invitation Garg had visited that country. 

While Sharma is said to be in Delhi fearing public outrage – hundreds had demonstrated in front of his house in Guwahati – Mahanta is understood to have stayed on in Singapore, also apprehending a physical attack as several of Garg’s fans had protested in front of his residence too. The SIT, meanwhile, has asked both to present themselves before it in Guwahati by October 6. Allegations of financial bungling by Sharma and Mahanta have been all over local media ever since the investigating team visited Sharma and Mahanta’s residences.  

Alongside demanding “Justice for Zubeen”, his fans had also protested the felling of several trees to build a new flyover – a plan which Garg had vocally been against. The protest that he had led had forced the Sarma government to postpone the felling but it was resumed shortly after he passed away. Many reached the spot to protest, leading to arrests and police baton charges. 

Adani’s visit to Garg’s residence has come at a time when his fans have been highlighting his activism to protect the environment and the natural resources of the state and questioning the Sarma government. 

A number of projects over large tracts of land

During the Modi era, a number of projects have been assigned to the Adani Group by the Sarma government which involve thousands of acres of mineral-rich land of the state. In a recent interview to The Wire, state’s young politician and president of the local party, Assam Jatiya Parishad (AJP), had claimed that a “total of 55,000 bighas of Assam’s land” would be handed over to various corporate houses including the Adani Group. “Of that figure, 49,500 bighas are in the tribal and Sixth Schedule areas of Assam. It means, the most affected lot from the Sarma government’s eviction drive would be the state’s Adivasi/tribal population.”

He particularly counted a large chunk of that land going to the Adani Group and the Reliance Industries. Thousands of bighas of land in the tribal Karbi Anglong district will be used to build a compressed bio-gas unit and “a proposed solar plant”. Gogoi also stated that most of those lands are mineral-rich as per findings of the Geological Survey of India (GSI). 

Assam-based researcher and commentator Bonojit Hussain, in an insightful article in The Wire this July, had shed the spotlight on this aspect in the GSI’s report on Assam and some other north-eastern states. He had underlined that its handbook had stated that its land is mineral-rich and is “under explored” and ideal for private investment. 

“The handbook’s extraction-driven territorial logic recasts every Northeastern state as a frontier meticulously catalogued for mineral volume and value, while erasing the region’s socio-cultural and ecological complexity,” Hussain had written. 

“Assam, the region’s demographic heartland, is presented with even starker mineral arithmetic,” he had underlined. 

Hussain had also focused on the state’s mineral-rich Dhubri region. Hundreds of people from the state’s Bengali-origin Muslim community were evicted in Dhubri by the Sarma government this July after being called “Bangladeshi” and “infiltrators”. This clears the land for a mega power project to be contracted to the Adani Group.   

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