By Razia Masood
Assam is underwater once again. The death toll has crossed 100, with nearly 1.37 lakh people affected across seven districts. According to the latest bulletin from the Assam State Disaster Management Authority (ASDMA), Sivasagar remains the worst-hit district, recording the highest number of deaths. Hundreds of villages lie submerged, thousands of hectares of cropland have been destroyed, and thousands of people are sheltering in relief camps. As happens every year, the Brahmaputra and its tributaries are flowing above the danger mark, with new areas continuously coming under threat.
This didn’t happen overnight. It started on 19 July 2026, when a cloudburst in Nagaland’s Mon district sent a wall of water crashing down into Assam’s Brahmaputra Valley, pushing the Dikhow, Disang, Janji, and Dhansiri rivers well past their danger marks. Districts like Sivasagar, Charaideo, Jorhat, and Golaghat, which don’t usually see flooding on this scale, took the worst hit. At the peak of the crisis, over 700,000 people had been displaced, and officials are calling it Assam’s worst flood in more than 50 years. Water has started receding in some pockets now, with families slowly making their way back to whatever’s left of their homes, but several rivers are still flowing above the danger mark, so the danger hasn’t really passed.
But behind this picture of devastation lies another question, one far more painful than the numbers themselves.
When Rhetoric Turned Divisive
Just a few months ago, a statement by Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma made headlines, in which he reportedly said that if a Muslim rickshaw puller asked for five rupees as fare, people should give him only four, so that he would face hardship and be forced to leave Assam. This was not a stray personal remark; it was said from a public platform, drew sharp criticism across the country, and led a joint forum of opposition parties to submit a memorandum to the President over it.
This was not an isolated statement. The Chief Minister has repeatedly targeted Bengali-speaking Muslims, sometimes by talking of driving them out of livelihoods, sometimes through communally charged remarks on population. The result is that at the very moment Assam most needs unity and government sensitivity, the same divisive politics keeps playing out, targeting one section of society.
And then there’s the promise that has now become nothing but a bitter joke. Ahead of the 2021 Assembly elections, Union Home Minister Amit Shah told Assam’s voters: “Give the BJP five more years, and we will make Assam flood-free.” This was the very first point in the BJP’s election manifesto. Five years have passed, the BJP returned to power, and yet Assam still drowns every monsoon. People are now asking on social media, where is that ‘flood-free Assam’?
Hands That Rose Amid the Devastation
In this very atmosphere, while official rhetoric was sowing hatred, a very different picture was emerging on the ground. AIUDF chief Maulana Badruddin Ajmal threw himself into relief work for flood victims. He personally visited the worst-affected districts Sivasagar, Charaideo, and Jorhat, released funds for immediate relief through the Ajmal Foundation, and later announced a larger rehabilitation package that included building homes for displaced families and distributing the traditional Assamese mekhela-sador to women in need. He made it clear that this assistance would reach people without any political or religious discrimination.
It wasn’t Ajmal alone. From the Barak Valley to Upper Assam, numerous Muslim volunteers and organisations rode boats from lane to lane, door to door. Carrying cooked food, dry rations, drinking water, and medicines, they reached areas where government machinery had slowed to a crawl. This scene stands as testimony that humanity does not wait for permission from hateful rhetoric, when water enters people’s homes, the hand that reaches out to help does not ask what religion the drowning person belongs to.
A Disaster Made Worse by Human Hands
Every year when Assam drowns, it gets written off as nature’s doing and left at that. But that’s not the whole story. Close to 40 per cent of the state is already flood-prone, and the Brahmaputra is one of the siltiest rivers in the world, which means embankments here keep weakening year after year regardless of how much rain falls. What made this year different was the timing, the cloudburst in Nagaland sent several rivers surging into the valley before the Brahmaputra had even hit its own peak, so water reached places that had simply never flooded before.
There’s a second reason too, one that rarely gets talked about. Years of deforestation in the hills, unchecked mining, and vanishing wetlands have quietly stripped away everything that used to slow the water down. Without that natural buffer, floodwater now runs straight into people’s homes with nothing in its way. The rain itself may be nature’s doing, but how far it travels and how much it destroys that’s a question of what we’ve allowed to happen upstream.
A Drowning Assam, a Silent Media
There is another dark side to this entire crisis, the silence of the mainstream media. More than a hundred deaths, nearly one and a half lakh people affected, hundreds of villages submerged despite devastation of this scale, national media has not given it the space or attention that any other major disaster would receive. No prime-time debates, no sustained ground reporting, none of the pressure that would hold the government accountable.
Assam drowns every year, and every year this same silence repeats itself as if the disasters of the Northeast simply don’t meet the bar of newsworthiness applied to the rest of the country. This silence is just as much in question as the government’s indifference.
Relief on Paper, Relief on the Ground
To be fair, the administration hasn’t been sitting idle. There are currently 125 relief camps and distribution centres running, sheltering close to 49,000 people, with rice, dal, and salt reaching those who lost everything. Assam’s Chief Secretary held a review meeting with district officials in the worst-hit areas recently, asking banks to give loan moratoriums and fresh credit to affected families, and telling insurance companies to speed up claims for people who lost their documents in the water. On paper, none of this sounds wrong.
The trouble is what happens between the order being issued and it actually reaching someone standing in waist-deep water. Government relief, even when it’s genuinely intended, tends to move slowly through layers of paperwork, through districts that are themselves cut off by the same floods. It’s in that gap that ordinary people and community groups have kept showing up, doing quietly and quickly what official channels are still catching up to.
The Questions That Remain
This flood in Assam is not just nature’s fury, it is a tragedy that repeats year after year, standing on years of administrative negligence and broken promises. At the very moment when the state’s leadership needs to carry the whole of society along, divisive language and forgotten guarantees surface instead. But this disaster has also shown that when politics sows hatred, ordinary people regardless of their religion step forward carrying a message of love and brotherhood.
Today, Assam is battling not just the water, but also questions that still await their answers.
[The writer is based in Bhopal.]
