Bulldozer injustice: Domicide doesn’t just destroy homes – it turns homelands hostile

Urban infrastructural violence has long been normalised in Indian urban planning discourse as development and redevelopment. The judiciary in India has played a central role in what has been so far termed as evictions, displacement and slum clearance – which involve destroying homes made by common citizens from their private resources.

Dispossessing people of their homes by the state has not stayed limited to India’s metropolitan cities clamouring to become Singapore or New York. The strategy has also spread to small towns and the rural and forest hinterland in the name of infrastructure development for nation-building.

Undisguised public displays of brutality are believed to have become unacceptable in the second half of the 20th century, following the move towards a democratic and human rights-based global order. The truth is that dispossession and humiliation were merely adapted to fit in the neoliberal juridico-political framework.

India’s seemingly sophisticated jurisprudence of “slum clearance” makes the necessary nods at all the important rights – such as the right to life, livelihood and adequate housing. But ultimately, it provides a step-by-step playbook for governments to willfully snatch land from people.

The idea that land belongs to whoever has the brute force to grab it has been foundational to the power exercised not only by foreign invaders or colonisers but also by local, and homegrown sovereigns and leaders.

Nationalist and democratically elected political leaders in post-colonial India long used secular, scientific and progressive language to hide the barbarity of a state willfully and violently destroying the dwellings of its own subject-citizens.

This willful destruction of homes and habitat by a state has been called domicide. Domicide effected at a mass scale intended to wipe out urban moorings of a people is termed as urbicide.

The punitive demolitions in India targeting Muslims represent the communalisation of this phenomenon, allowing for the destruction of homes to be detached entirely now from any pretence of development and legality.

Such demolitions targeting Muslims are more than eviction, displacement and material dispossession. This domicide constitutes extreme cruelty, vicious violence and a blatant disregard for human dignity and cultural heritage.

This is a modern, barbaric practice executed to affect a community’s erasure, barely with a veneer of legitimacy, supported by the state apparatus and justified through a combination of judicial and political rhetoric.

The punitive demolitions targeting Muslims that have taken place after the passage of deeply unfair Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 were presented to the public as a testament to and celebration of the community’s disenfranchisement.

The Act offers a fast track to Indian citizenship for persecuted immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh who entered India on or before December 31, 2014 – except if they are Muslim.

In the winter of 2019-’20, Hindutva supporters, under the protective eye of the Uttar Pradesh and Delhi Police, unleashed wanton violence in Muslims homes and educational institutions as retribution for the enormous protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act.

For the “crime” of exercising their right to protest, Muslims were punished by the demolition of their homes and businesses, and also by large-scale attachments of their properties.

Since then, the instances of demolitions – which are totally arbitrary in law but are clearly politically motivated against Muslims – have only increased. Despite petitions in the several high courts and even in the Supreme Court of India, there has been a resolute judicial refusal to recognise that these demolitions flout any laws.

Even the court’s decision on Wednesday proposing a set of guidelines to be followed before demolishing homes follows in the familiar trajectory of the ever intensifying precarity of the right to housing of the poor in India. The court’s cursory directives to the authorities to follow due process have done nothing to halt the trend. This is mostly because no matter how the honourable courts define contours of the due process, the end result is judicially-authorised dispossession.

Conducted with the express intent of maintaining a majoritarian order and to “teach a lesson” to Muslims, the annihilation of Muslim houses and places of worship is recorded on cellphone cameras and goes viral as evidence that the “sacred” geography of the nation is being purified.The self-proclaimed “nationalists” celebrate these demolitions as the erasure of “anti-nationals”.

Each instance is meant to be a replay of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992, where too the judiciary played a crucial role in the long and torturous political transformation of a land dispute into a civilisational, ethnonationalist crusade.

Despite the Hindu nationalist claim of decolonising India of its “1,000 years of foreign rule in one form or the other”, domicide and urbicide are decidedly a historical policy of invasion, colonisation and war against a people.

In South Asia, demolitions and land grabs were policies of the British-Indian colonial state with which it asserted its dominance over Indian rebels – whether royal or commoners.

In other parts of the world, actions like the bombing of Dresden in Germany, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan towards the end of World War II and the destruction of cities and homes in Vietnam, Bosnia, Chechnya, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Iraq were far from being measures of the last resort in frustration. They were, in fact, policies developed deliberately by technocrats and diplomats to ensure maximum damage to civilian populations and urban infrastructure.

Domicide and urbicide are also propaganda devices. A people without livable homes and a people without a homeland are denied their full humanity. Relegated to subhuman status, they are liable to be treated as such.

This long history of domicide and urbicide reached a new milestone in the evolution of technology of destruction with the deployment of bulldozers by the Israeli state, which has been literally built over the debris of demolished Palestinian homes and lands.

Long before India began to celebrate Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath as Bulldozer Baba and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivnath Singh Chouhan as Bulldozer Mama, it was the Israeli premier Ariel Sharon who was known as The Bulldozer owing to his policy of expanding Jewish settlements.

The Israeli use of the bulldozer as a war machine against the Palestinian people was the result of a technological innovation that modified and added armour to the D9R Caterpillar bulldozer.

The Israeli Defence Forces have used these modified bulldozers for both “routine” and wartime domicide and urbicide in Palestinian territories.

Could it be a mere coincidence that India’s Hindutva supremacists adopted the same politics of death, describing Muslims and minorities as termites or a cancer on the sacred geography of the ethnostate?

A bulldozer is a convenient innovation for national governments that might find it difficult to bomb their own citizens, even second-class ones.

Using bulldozers or destroying human dwellings and habitat is a war against a people by a state, even if legitimated by legislatures and high officials or facilitated by the courts.

In Uttar Pradesh’s Allahabad, the demolition in June 2022 of the family home of a Muslim activist who was accused of organising what was a peaceful protest was telecast live on news channels accompanied by frenzied commentary. Through the duration of demolition, all the activist’s members of the family in the city were detained by police. No advocates or activists were allowed in the vicinity of the home.

In another instance, in Madhya Pradesh in July 2023, the celebration was rather literal – the police and municipal authorities got a DJ music system to play ethno-nationalist beats as the bulldozers demolished the homes of two minors accused of spitting on a Hindu religious procession.

In both the cases, the victims of the bulldozer violence not only lost their homes but were incarcerated for months before they could get bail. In Delhi, where both the police and the Delhi Development Authority function under the Central government, dozens of historic and new mosques have been demolished on flimsiest of complaints, without taking any trouble about due procedure. Muslim-owned properties were specifically targeted in mixed residential areas.

In a report earlier this year, Amnesty International also evidenced that demolitions were concentrated in Muslim-majority areas, especially in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.

For BJP governments at the Centre and in states, this nationalist model for dispossession of the powerless is decidedly more useful than the secular, urban, slum clearance model for “building world-class cities”. These cities were also nationalist spaces and supposed to invoke pride in place as the engines for national economic growth.

With the wide-spread diffusion of impunity for targeting minorities, the imagery of the bulldozer has become a part of right-wing popular culture. Having gained acceptance among majoritarian and supremacist sections of society, domicide is now insidiously normalised and extremely difficult to resist, as the middle class and relatively affluent residents of Ayodhya recently discovered when their shops and homes were demolished as the town was transformed in the run-up to the inauguration of the new Ram temple.

Municipal administrations and police in areas administered by BJP governments in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Maharashtra and now Rajasthan do not shy away from publicly discussing what the victims are being punished for.

While the impunity is drawn from those at the helm of the government hailed as Bulldozer Chief Ministers, who are popular for their fascination for destruction, the inspiration provided by the tactics of settler colonial and neo-imperial states allows them to talk about bulldozing as a lesson in rule of law and civilisation.

Urbicide and domicide are often considered lesser horrors than genocide and homicide. But if attention is paid to journalistic, literary or sociological accounts of those affected, it is clear that many of them feel that it is better to die than to survive the destruction of their homes. The grief and humiliation of domicide is dehumanising.

Targetted domicide, even if framed as a punishment for crimes, is not only against the principles of natural justice because it penalises co-residents of a home with the person who has allegedly committed a crime but it is also a collective punishment for all those who share the targeted identity.

The destruction of homes and demolitions of tangible cultural heritage as a historical colonial strategy to assert dominance and control conveys contempt of the powerful in a way nothing else can.

Colonial urbicide and domicide necessarily involved a double-speak: condemning the natives or minorities for not being civilised while simultaneously destroying their habitat – homes, places of worship, burial grounds, depriving them of their architectural heritage. Despite the lofty calls for decolonisation, post-colonial states as well as the neo-colonisers retain the punitive rationality of their colonial predecessors.

The violence of domicide is comprehensive and profound. That this is all done under the guise of maintaining order, rule of law, nation-building and in an especially cruel turn in India, even decolonisation, is a measure of how devastatingly effective demolitions are as a tool of domination.

There is no method of intimidating populations and suppressing dissent that is more chilling than domicide. It not only destroys homes but also turns the homeland into hostile territory.

Ghazala Jamil, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi