On August 5, Guwahati experienced one of the worst urban floods in its living memory. A two-hour downpour left shops and homes inundated.
The largest city in the North East came to a standstill. Thousands of residents were stuck on the roads and newly-built flyovers for more than six or seven hours.
In the face of mounting criticism, Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma blamed a private university located in neighbouring state of Meghalaya for the flood. Indeed, he went a step ahead and accused the University of Science and Technology Meghalaya of “flood jihad”.
The USTM’s campus, Sarma alleged, was built by cutting trees and destroying hills in the Ri Bhoi district, triggering floods in Guwahati.
The university, set up in 2008, is owned by Mahbubul Hoque, a Muslim of Bengali origin from Assam’s Karimganj district. “We talk about land jihad, he has started a flood jihad against Assam,” Sarma claimed. “Otherwise, no one can cut hills in such a ruthless way. It is a deliberate [act].”
In accusing the USTM of a sinister plot, Sarma was echoing social media accounts that claimed in 2022 that miscreants had destroyed a river embankment in Assam’s Silchar as part of a “flood jihad” against Hindu residents of the town.
Last year, the Assam chief minister had accused Bengal-origin Muslim vegetable growers of the state of “fertiliser jihad”, a term he had coined to blame the farmers for conspiring to damage their Hindu buyers’ health by overdosing their crop with chemicals. It was an echo of the Hindutva conspiracy theory of “love jihad”, which claims that Muslim men seduce Hindu women in order to convert them to Islam, and effect demographic change in the country.
But as the city’s residents continue to grapple with the after-effects of the flood and more instances of rain bringing the city to a halt, few seemed impressed by Sarma’s extraordinary claim.
“The chief minister is not taking responsibility. These days, his speech [only] revolves around Hindu-Muslim politics,” said Mukunda Saikia, a lyricist and research scholar, whose rented one-room house was flooded on August 5. The water damaged his papers, paintings, his guitar, books and clothes, among other effects.
Another resident of the city, Hemchandra Chamua, pointed out: “Even if we agree that water from the university entered the Khanapara side, what about areas like Maligaon, Nabin Nagar, Zoo Road, Chandmari, among others? Will the USTM water go that far?”
Chamua added: “His [CM] statement is disappointing.”
Several residents in the heart of the city told Scroll that the construction of a nearby flyover, an incomplete and faulty drainage system, and inefficient city administrators have exacerbated floods in Guwahati.
Experts pointed out there are structural problems behind the flooding in the city that cannot be blamed on a university coming up on the hills overlooking Guwahati.
“This is what polarisation does,” said Shillong-based editor Patricia Mukhim. “He knows he has failed in civic management of Guwahati city, where wetlands are being reclaimed by builders. So best to divert people’s attention to a Muslim-owned institution.”
Fifteen days after the August 5 flood, several parts of Guwahati were again flooded after overnight rain, with massive traffic snarls across the city. Soon after, Sarma doubled down on his attack on USTM, claiming that his government may consider barring graduates from the university from state government jobs.
The downpour and deluge
On August 5, Guwahati received heavy rainfall – 7 cm-11 cm, as per the India Meteorological Department data.
“Once the rain stopped, water gushed into my shop and house,” said Chamua, the 45-year-old owner of a computer repair shop in Rukminigaon. A guard wall in front of his shop built to prevent the water from entering did not help that day. “The water level was too high.”
A week after the deluge, when Scroll visited Rukminigaon, a residential neighbourhood about 2 km from the Assam secretariat, a large machine was pumping water from the road into the city’s main water channel, Bharalu-Bahini, which drains into the Brahmaputra.
Several areas continued to be under three feet of water.
Chamua had to stay away for three nights, after which he waded through black waist-deep water to reach his shop. “Meghalaya water did not come here,” he said.
Instead, several residents in the neighbourhood connected the floods to a spate of construction activity.
“We have been getting intense floods since the flyover was constructed three four years ago,” Shaswati Boro, a 45-year-old woman who runs a small rice hotel in Rukminigaon said, pointing to the flyover at Dispur-Supermarket, built by Himanta Biswa Sarma government at a cost of Rs 127 crore.
“There was a channel or stream beneath the flyover before it was constructed,” Boro said. “It is blocked with waste and construction debris from the flyover,” Boro said.
Rukminigaon sits at the bottom of the flyover, and is flooded by the run-off from it, residents said.
Guwahati has over 18 flyovers, most of them have been built in the last five years by the BJP government. Two more, including Assam’s longest flyover, ar coming up.
A blame game
Civil society groups sharply reacted to the comments made by the chief minister, which are seen as a desperate attempt to deflect attention from his government's failure to control the devastating floods in Guwahati.
“By targeting a university and its promoter, a Muslim individual, he sought to communalise the issue and shift the blame,” said a statement issued by Minority Watch, a group of North-East based civil society group members from different communities.
The USTM strongly refuted accusations made by the chief minister, and said that its campus “may contribute a minuscule portion” of the total water that flows to downstream areas through drains in areas like Jorabat. “The campus infrastructure expansions have all requisite permission from the Meghalaya government,” it said.
Almost 6,000 students study at the university which employs 1,500 faculty and employees from across northeastern, including Assam.
Before Sarma’s statement, another minister Ashok Singhal had blamed the unprecedented urban flooding to water from neighbouring Meghalaya.
Systemic issue
Shaped like a trough, Guwahati is surrounded by a total of 15 hills, from which sediments and water come down during the rains.
In 2016, the Assam State Disaster Management Authority entrusted professor Arup Kumar Sarma of the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, to evaluate water and sediment runoff from the nearby hills.
The high level of flood risks stem from the “undulating topography of the city”, which makes it flood-prone and the “encroachment of natural drain channels and wetlands,” the ASDMA report said.
“We have shown in our study that sediment yield and high runoff generation from the hilly terrain of Guwahati city is the main culprit for urban flooding of Guwahati city,” Sarma, who was the principal consultant of the study, told Scroll. He said it was not possible to blame one university for the flood.
“If the vegetation in the hills is extinct, the probability of sediment and water coming down from the hills increases significantly,” he explained. “The sediment tends to block drains, and low-lying areas are often flooded.”
The drainage system of Guwahati city depends on the existing natural water channels like Bharalu-Bahini and wetlands like the Silsako Beel and the Deepar Beel, among others.
“The Bahini, which was once a river, has turned into a dormant clogged drain,” said Shaswati Boro. “So, the water that flows into it comes back to the city.”
Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman, a Guwahati-based independent researcher, who has worked on the issue of transboundary water-sharing, agreed. “The situation that we see today is a result of cumulative encroachment of wetlands such as Deepor Beel and devastation of hills surrounding the city of Guwahati, not alone that of Meghalaya, but also within Assam.”
Experts like Rahman also blame the floods on large-scale infrastructure interventions done without proper assessments and stakeholder consultations.
Rahman said as the concretisation of Guwahati increases through buildings and flyovers, the urban landscape’s capacity to absorb excess water diminishes.
“The surface runoff from the concrete spaces in Guwahati is higher, and percolation to the earth is getting lower,” he said. “Successive governments have been instrumental in totally destroying the wetlands around Guwahati, which are natural flood sinks.”
He argued that urban planners must be made accountable “for not anticipating such disasters, and not coordinating with neighbouring states.”
