The last few days of 2025 saw Assam plunged into a new wave of fear, anger and fire. This time the epicenter of violence was West Karbi Anglong district of central Assam.

The Karbi community is one of the oldest tribal groups in the North-East. They are the third largest ethnic group in Assam after the Bodos and Misings.

Undivided Karbi Anglong is geographically the largest among the 35 districts of Assam. It covers more than 13 percent of the state’s land, but only 3. 7 percent of its population.

This tract of land, which has the second lowest figure of population density (63 persons per square kilometre), is an unlikely site for social tensions around land and demography. But that’s exactly what happened.

The sequence of events in late 2025, when the situation became catastrophic, begins in early 2024. The bone of contention was the alleged settlement of a small number of Bihari and Bengali Hindu families on the Professional Grazing Reserve (PGR) and Village Grazing Reserve (VGR). Both of these types of reserved grasslands are for open grazing of livestock of both the indigenous Karbi people and the old settlers from the plains of India.

But no one, not even “sons of the soil”, has the legal right to settle on reserved grazing lands. Dissatisfaction came to the fore in early 2024 when Karbi nationalist organizations began alleging that Bihari residents had encroached on the PGR and VGR and built permanent structures.

He attacked the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council (KAAC) and the Government of Assam, claiming that such “continued encroachment” on a large scale by “outsiders” has weakened the safeguards given to the Sixth Schedule areas under Article 244 (2) of the Constitution of India.