Eleven tribal residents of Torsa Tea Garden in West Bengal’s Alipurduar district were arrested on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, for protesting the construction of a land port at the India-Bhutan border. Four women and seven men, all from adivasi and tribal communities, were taken into custody after police moved in on a months-long protest site.

The protesters were not rioters. They were families who had camped beside the project for more than 100 days, asking for rehabilitation and compensation for land they say they have worked for generations. The construction at the Land Ports Authority of India (LPAI) site in Gotabari, Torsa Tea Garden, had been underway for nearly five months. For all of that time, the locals kept up what they describe as a peaceful, indefinite dharna beside the work.

The arrests came after a confrontation on November 2. Bulldozers arrived that day to continue work on disputed land, and the families’ repeated demands for compensation were ignored. People protested and argued with officials. That exchange of words is now the basis of a criminal case.

A First Information Report built on a junior engineer’s complaint

The FIR, registered as Jaigaon PS Case No. 326/26 on November 3, rests on a written complaint from Rakesh Kumar Meena, a Junior Engineer with the LPAI. The complaint is dated November 2, the same day the bulldozers arrived.

The families of those arrested say they had no idea where their relatives were for about 18 hours. During that stretch, the detainees were moved through four to five police stations before the arrests were formally recorded. For people trying to find out whether their mothers, sons and neighbours were alive, safe, or charged, that gap is not a technicality. It is the kind of silence that turns a protest into a crisis.

A hundred days with no police complaint

The Paschim Banga Cha Majoor Samity (PBCMS), a registered non-political union of tea garden workers, has pushed back hard on the official version. Its press statement points out that there was no police complaint of obstruction or violence during the preceding 100 days, when locals were protesting against land acquisition at the site.

In other words, the authorities had 100 days of a protest they did not formally call a threat. The union says the situation only changed when machinery came onto disputed ground without addressing the people living on it. The union’s account of November 2 is that there was argument, not assault.

“There was no violence, assault or damage to government property. Protest and disagreement cannot be criminalised as violence,” the union said in a press statement.

That line cuts to the core of the dispute. If a peaceful sit-in and a heated argument with officials can be turned into a criminal case, then anyone who challenges a government project on their own land is exposed to arrest.

Three activists named, none present

The FIR goes further than the eleven people in custody. It names prominent social activist Anuradha Talwar, Binoy Kerkatta and Mahesh Xalxo as having allegedly “provoked and instigated” the crowd. Neither of the three was present at the protest site.

Naming people who were absent is a serious escalation. It suggests that the case is not only about what happened on a single morning at Torsa, but about who is seen as behind the community’s resistance. For activists and families alike, it reads as an attempt to attach a larger conspiracy to a local dispute that, by the union’s account, was never violent.

What an independent team found on the land

The dispute did not begin with these arrests. Earlier this year, an independent fact-finding team made up of Professor Virginius Xaxa, Siraj Dutt and Anuprada Singh visited Torsa from August 1 to 3, 2026. Their findings, as reported, confirm that generations of affected families have cultivated this land without ownership documents.

That detail matters. Families who have farmed a piece of ground for decades without a title are often the first to be pushed off it when a state project arrives. Without paperwork, their claims are easy to dismiss on paper, even when the land has been their livelihood for as long as anyone can remember.

Locals return to the site

The arrests have not ended the protest. Locals from the tea garden have started protests against the administration at the proposed land port site. The message is blunt: the people who were detained are not the only ones prepared to stay on that ground.

The union’s demands. PBCMS has called for the immediate release of all 11 people arrested. It wants the “false charges” against the 11 residents, and against the three named activists, withdrawn. The union is also demanding an immediate halt to further eviction until land rights, compensation and rehabilitation claims are settled. Beyond the case itself, it wants recognition of tea garden workers’ land rights and ownership of the land they have occupied and used for generations.

The union’s frustration is aimed squarely at the state government. In its view, the West Bengal government has chosen bulldozers and police action instead of dialogue. That is the sentence that will stick with anyone following the case: a community asked for a conversation about money and home, and received handcuffs.

The question underneath the arrests

This case asks a basic question that goes well beyond one tea garden in Alipurduar. Can people who have lived and farmed on a piece of land for generations be jailed for asking to be compensated and rehabilitated before that land is taken from them? The facts reported so far point to a community that kept its protest peaceful for more than three months, a formal complaint filed the day machinery arrived, and arrests followed by a scramble for information from families who could not find their own.

The protest has not been proven to be violent, and the source reporting does not establish any damage to government property. What it does establish is a clash between a land port project moving forward and a community whose claims remain unresolved on paper. Until those claims are settled, every bulldozer that moves onto the site will carry the same question with it.

For now, the immediate fight is about the eleven people in custody and whether the charges will stand. The longer fight is about whether tribal and tea garden families who have no documents to show for their land will be heard before the machines arrive, or only after the handcuffs.