In Udaipur, one home razed, three families punished for a Muslim teenager’s crime

Last month, the Supreme Court called a halt to the demolition of properties of those accused of any crime – a policy used by several Bharatiya Janata Party state governments to punish Indians, especially Muslims. With the court poised to lay down guidelines for such demolitions, Scroll’s reporters went back to several victims of “bulldozer injustice” to document the toll of state action on their lives.

On August 16, a 15-year-old Muslim student of a government school in Udaipur got into a fight with a classmate during recess. He took out a knife and stabbed the other boy. Three days later, the injured teenager, a Hindu, died.

In the three days between the stabbing and the death, a bulldozer ran through the lives of three Muslim families of Udaipur.

A day after the stabbing, the Udaipur civic authorities demolished the 15-year-old’s rented home in the Kachchi Basti locality on the ground that it had been built on unauthorised land. The action was taken after Hindutva supporters in the city held violent protests demanding what they called “bulldozer justice”.

The 15-year-old was sent to a juvenile home and his father, Saleem Sheikh, arrested on the allegation that he instigated his son.

The civic action also affected the lives of two other families, who had nothing to do with the death of the teenager. This included Abid Khan, a tea-seller who was a tenant at the same home, and the owner, Abdul Rashid Khan.

“Why did they bulldoze my home when the accused was my tenant’s son?” Abdul Rashid Khan asked. The 61-year-old answered the question himself: “They wanted to set an example by demolishing a Muslim’s home.”

The demolition followed a pattern in which civic authorities in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have demolished several purportedly illegal properties of those accused of crimes, mostly Muslims. There are no provisions in Indian law that allow for such punitive demolitions.

On August 30, the human rights body, Association for Protection of Civil Rights in Udaipur, filed a petition in the Supreme Court, challenging the demolition of the rented house.

This was among a batch of petitions challenging such demolitions that the Supreme Court took up last month. On October 1, the Supreme Court noted that demolitions cannot be carried out “merely because somebody is an accused or a convict”. The top court reserved its judgement on a batch of petitions challenging such demolitions, including the one in Udaipur, saying it would issue guidelines for such matters.

With her husband in jail and her son in a juvenile home, the 15-year-old’s mother, Shameem Sheikh, draws little consolation from the court’s words. “I have lost my home, my son and my husband,” said Shameem. “Will the judgement help me get them back?”

After the demolition, Shameem found nobody willing to take her in as a tenant. “People are scared that their home will also be bulldozed,” said her eldest daughter Reshma Sheikh, who lives with her husband nearby.

Shameem and the youngest of her four daughters have had to move in with Reshma and her husband since the demolition. Households where Shameem used to work as domestic worker have asked her not to return. A small grocery store that Sheikh’s youngest daughter used to run out of the rented home was also razed.

Questions about the demolition

Kachchi Basti is a slum of more than 250 shanties and pucca houses, located along the slope of the Machla Magra hillock in Udaipur.

Yaqoob Mohammed, the Udaipur district president of human rights body People's Union for Civil Liberties, told Scroll that people started settling in the locality in the late 1970s. “A case of encroachment filed by the forest department has been pending in the courts for years, but no demolition ever took place,” Mohammed said.

In 2019, Abdul Rashid Khan bought a house from an acquaintance for Rs 17 lakh in this neighbourhood.

“I thought my sons would live there after they marry and have children,” Khan, who lives in his ancestral home in Udaipur’s Khanjipeer, a Muslim-dominated locality, told Scroll.

Khan rented out three rooms of the two-storey building to the Sheikh family, and two other rooms to Khan, the tea-seller.

Rashid Khan said that on August 16, he had asked the Sheikh family to vacate the house after the police filed a case against the minor boy.

“The next morning, Reshma [Sheikh] called me to say that authorities had put up a demolition notice outside the home,” said Khan.

As he rushed to his Kachchi Basti home, Khan found that in fact, two notices had been issued – one by the Udaipur municipal corporation and the other by the forest department, both saying that the house was on unauthorised land. Curiously, both the notices, dated August 16, were addressed to Saleem Sheikh, and not Khan, the owner.

The municipal corporation notice stated the house was built on government land, and threatened action if Sheikh did not clarify within 24 hours why he had built the house illegally.

The other notice said that Sheikh had encroached upon land belonging to the forest department, and the house would be demolished if Sheikh did not vacate the home by August 20.

Nevertheless, the house was demolished within hours of the notice being pasted.

Khan said that he visited several government offices urging that the demolition be stopped. Even as he ran pillar to post, a bulldozer and policemen in two vans lined up outside the home by noon. By 3 pm, the house was demolished.

Khan was left with debris of the razed building, the belongings of his tenants that they had no place to keep, and an array of questions. “How can the notice be issued on the tenant’s name and if it is on government land, why was my house singled out in the entire locality?” he questioned. “And why was the home bulldozed even before the stipulated time to vacate?”

He did not get the answers to any of these questions at the government offices he visited on the day of the demolition. The forest department officials told him that the demolition was being carried out by the municipal corporation. At the civic body’s office, Khan was told no officials were present due to a holiday.

At the district collectorate, an official said, “makaan har haal mein tootega” – the home will be razed at any cost. “I went to the police too, but they refused to register a complaint,” said Khan.

Almost two months after the demolition, Khan said that the Supreme Court’s action was welcome but was unsure of how it would help him. “Would I get compensation for my home?” he asked. The court has not said anything in this regard.

Targeted for their identity

Yaqoob Mohammed, the activist, said that the demolition was a clear case of “targeting Muslims as is happening across the country”.

When members of his organisation urged the police to stop the demolition on August 17, they were left aghast at the response. “We told the local station house officer that you will be remembered as the man who brought ‘bulldozer raj’ to Rajasthan,” Mohammed said. “To this, the police officer smugly said he would take pride in that.”

Reshma, the Sheikh family’s eldest daughter, also alleged that they were being targeted over their religious identity. She recounts that on August 16, when she and her father reached the local police station after the arrest of her brother, the station house officer made communally charged comments. “He said your community teaches children to stab,” Reshma said.

The police went on to accuse the boy’s father, Saleem Sheikh, of inciting him to violence. On September 4, a district court in Udaipur rejected Saleem’s bail application on the basis of the police statement that he had bought the knife that his son used for stabbing. The court order, as seen by Scroll, notes that the police submitted that Saleem Sheikh had asked his son to use the knife to attack anyone who troubles him in school.

‘Only because we are Muslim’

Abid Khan, the tea seller, migrated to Udaipur seven years ago from Araria district of Bihar in search of employment.

Since the demolition, Abid, with his wife and three daughters had to shift to six temporary shelters, before he finally got a rented accommodation two weeks ago.

“House owners have been asking me if I had any connection with the stabbing and why I had migrated from Bihar,” Abid Khan said. “My youngest daughter is just five months old, you can imagine our plight if I have to shift homes every other week.”

A fight between friends in a school was made into a communal issue to target the Muslims, he said. “The boy did wrong, you can punish him, but why is his father in jail?” Abid Khan questioned. “Only because he is a Muslim.”

Hope fading

“Let law take its course in the minor’s case, but the arrest of Saleem and the demolition are unlawful,” advocate Qamar Siddiqui, who heads the association that has petitioned the Supreme Court against the demolition, told Scroll. “The court has made its stand clear and we are hopeful for justice.”

The Sheikh family, however, is more fearful than optimistic.

Shameem Sheikh said that she has been able to meet his son only twice in the two months since his arrest. The rules allow family members to meet minors in custody once every week, Siddiqui said.

But officials at the juvenile home have turned Shameem back on five occasions, saying that she was not allowed to meet her son. “When I met him for the first time after his arrest, he was limping,” Shameem said. “He said that the police had beaten up him and his father with sticks and kicked them with boots.”

The day Scroll met her, Shameem was hopeful to see her son in juvenile court, but the hearing got postponed to October 19. As the day ended in hopelessness, Shameem said: “I have lost my home, and I fear I will lose my family too. I fear my son will be killed in custody.”

All photographs by Abhik Deb.