The decade-long leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been marked by a battery of mortal assaults on India’s constitutional edifice. These have cumulatively corroded and ultimately ravaged India’s secular democracy. Yet even amid this blitz of incursions, one that has stood out is the extrajudicial deployment of the bulldozer to target, intimidate and punish India’s Muslim citizens. This is a significant additive to the armoury of the ideological project of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to reduce them to second-class citizens.
From 2020, led by the example of Adityanath, the saffron-clad chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the bulldozer swiftly emerged as a wildly popular mascot of the BJP in every election campaign. BJP leaders holding high constitutional offices gloated in election rallies about its use to crush the rights and spirit of India’s largest religious minority. That what they termed “bulldozer justice” brazenly violated constitutional guarantees and the rule of law did not restrain them. On the contrary, they wore this defiant lawlessness as a badge of honour and an exemplar of their brand of masculinist, strongman Hindutva governance.
What is instructive is that even as “bulldozer justice” spread (like a pandemic or a blessing, depending on one’s moral and political compass) to all BJP-ruled states, to Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Assam and Gujarat – with BJP chief ministers competing to destroy more and more Muslim-owned properties – India’s higher judiciary chose culpably to look away.
The only notable exception was two judges of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Justices GS Sandhawalia and Harpreet Kaur Jeewan. After a communal clash in Nuh in August 2022, a succession of bulldozers razed for four days properties entirely of Muslims in the town of Nuh and further in a radius of 50 km.
The judges asked pointedly if the massive demolitions of shops, hotels and homes, without any due process, entirely of Muslims, was not a process of “ethnic cleansing”. Their intervention had the salutary impact of halting the demolitions. But the matter was shifted speedily by the chief justice to other judges, and the case ultimately closed with no public official being punished for the unlawful demolitions, and no compensation awarded to those who had been targeted.
Therefore when, after unconscionable inaction for four years of lawless targeted demolitions, a bench of the Supreme Court finally ordered governments to desist from razing properties without due legal process, there was a palpable sense of relief.
There is indeed much to laud in the judgment. “A house is not just a property but (it) embodies the collective hopes of a family or individuals for stability, security, and a future,” Justice BR Gavai observed. “If this is to be taken away, then the authority must be satisfied that this is the only option available.”
The court also reiterated the principle of “separation of powers” that gives the courts, not the executive, the authority to decide if a person was guilty of a crime or not. The judges were categorical that the government cannot transform itself into a judge to find an accused person guilty without trial and deliver a “collective punishment” to the person and his family by wrecking the person’s home and “shared memories” of the family with a bulldozer. This would be a violation of the rule of law, which is part of the inviolable “basic structure” of the Constitution. “Depriving innocent people of their right to life by removing shelter from their heads, in our considered view, would be wholly unconstitutional.”
And yet I fear that the guidelines the court has ordered will not be sufficient to restrain BJP governments from the extrajudicial targeting of Muslim properties in the future.
Let us begin with the operative part of the order: the court’s “binding directives”. These include a prior notice of demolition of at least 15 days to the occupants. The notice must provide details of the nature of the unauthorised construction, and specific violations and grounds warranting demolition. The owner or occupants who want to challenge the State action must be given a fair opportunity for this. The final order of the authority must have reasoned conclusions; and the actual demolition must be videographed.
These guidelines are unexceptionable in principle. But the truth is that they differ little from directives that have been issued by the highest court many times through the past decades, orders that have been consistently violated by state and municipal governments, with mostly no consequences for the public officials who disobeyed the court.
The key problem with the current guidelines is that they do not address the central problem with the current countrywide deluge of demolitions. This is that the bias displayed by the executive is not simply against people who are poor and powerless – slum and pavement residents and street vendors – as in the past. The bias of the state in its demolition campaigns of recent years is primarily communal, deriving from the ideology of Hindutva. It is not just anti-poor.
The sole part of the Supreme Court judgement that tacitly acknowledges this, and indirectly that many of these demolitions target particular communities, is this observation by Justice Gavai: “When a particular structure is chosen all of a sudden for demolition and the rest of the similarly situated structures in the same vicinity are not even touched, mala fide may loom large.”
He is entirely right. But this recognition just does not go far enough. The court’s 95-page ruling does not call out the ideological project that leads to such extrajudicial targeting with demolitions of a religious minority, nor does it reflect on the implications of this for India’s entire constitutional project which is based on the core principle of equal citizenship and equal rights for people of every faith and identity. Its guidelines do nothing to address the communal targeting behind the contemporary BJP-led demolitions drives in many states.
The ideological project of the Sangh is to transform pluralist India, founded on a secular democratic constitution, into the Hindu nation, in which Muslim and Christian minorities are reduced into second class citizens. Under Modi, the BJP for the first time after India’s freedom won power with a full majority in Lok Sabha, for 10 years. It fully used this opportunity to operationalise its ideological project in many ways, such as with an alarming rise in religious hate crimes through lynching, genocidal hate speeches, attacks on Muslim and Christian worship, attacks on Muslim livelihoods, violent campaigns against claims of cow slaughter and love jihad, and falsifying history to stoke hatred against Muslims. In Modi’s second term, from 2019-2024, when the BJP returned to power with even larger voter support, demolishing Muslim properties with bulldozers became a powerful and popular new official weapon in the tacit war the BJP-RSS waged against its Muslim citizens.
The demolitions often followed claims of communal violence by Muslims. It did not matter that these communal skirmishes were most frequently directly ignited by cadres of the RSS family of organisations. “Routes of Wrath”, a report edited by senior lawyer Chander Uday Singh, is an account of how in states across India – Gujarat, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Goa, West Bengal, Karnataka, Bihar, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh – a remarkably similar pattern of lighting communal fires was deployed during the festival of Ram Navami in April 2022.
The routes of the religious procession were diverted to pass close to mosques, outside which the processions would halt for long periods, with feverish dancing to loud music and raucous slogans abusing Muslims. Stone-throwing and a communal skirmish would break out, some houses and shops would burn, and a couple of days later in BJP-ruled states, bulldozers would be called out to demolish the houses of people of Muslim identity who the local administration had decided were guilty of rioting.
Often, demolitions would also follow protests by Muslim citizens. In a recent column, I described the razing of the homes of Muslim community leaders in Prayagraj and other cities in Uttar Pradesh after protests erupted in June 2022 against statements by the BJP spokesperson Nupur Sinha abusing Prophet Mohammad. At other times, demolitions are simply individual punishments, such as of alleged criminals, or as in July 2023, the home of a teenaged boy accused of spitting on a religious procession in Ujjain was pulled down. The demolition team brought with it a band to relay loud celebratory music. In Assam, the houses and farms of Bengali Muslims are demolished widely because they are falsely stigmatised as Bangladeshi “infiltrators”.
The ideological character of the demolitions as integral to the hate project against Muslims is rarely disguised by political leaders. BJP Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament GVL Narasimha Rao tweeted that the JCB – JCB is the British company that manufactures most of the bulldozers deployed in India – actually stands for Jihad Control Board. Mrityunjay Kumar, the media advisor to the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, openly threatened Muslims with his social media post that every Friday is followed by a Saturday, with a picture of a bulldozer.
Even while the Supreme Court was hearing the bunch of petitions against “bulldozer justice”, the saffron-clad chief minister publicly boasted, “Only someone with a ‘dil aur dimaag’ (heart and mind) as strong as a bulldozer can operate one”. The prime minister during the 2024 election campaigns advised the Opposition parties to learn how to deploy bulldozers from chief minister Adityanath.
Many BJP election rallies are led by bulldozers. BJP supporters wave the party flag from the blades of bulldozers. Saffron t-shirts and caps emblazoned with pictures of bulldozers are popular with young men. Many also line up for bulldozer tattoos. Bulldozers have become icons of the ideological project of the BJP-RSS. If you accept the premise that Muslims are the “enemies within”, then bulldozers represent punishments to them for the real and imagined crimes of history by Muslim rulers, and effective weapons to tame them and restrain and punish them for various alleged jihads such as of cow slaughter, breeding large families, love jihad, religious conversions and terror crimes.
This ideological project of the BJP-RSS – unambiguously one of fostering hatred against a section of citizens of the country – brazenly violates India’s constitutional guarantee of equal rights of people of every region, caste and gender. It openly flouts the constitutional separation between the judiciary and the executive. It awards a punishment that is not sanctioned in India’s statute books, of demolishing the home of an accused person (or the father of such a person, such as in the Ujjain demolishing punishing a teenaged boy for purportedly spitting on a religious procession).
The executive can allege the guilt of a person, but it is for the courts to decide if the person is guilty of the alleged crime and to award punishment. For this, the courts must begin with a presumption of the innocence of the person accused, and the burden lies with the executive through the police investigation and the public prosecutor, to establish the person’s guilt. But today, armed with the bulldozer, the executive is deciding the guilt of a person with no due legal process and is also pronouncing and executing punishments that are not in any statute book.
With its recent judgement, even if so belatedly, the Supreme Court finally did address the lawless misuse of the bulldozer. But will its ruling be consequential in protecting India’s Muslims from illegal and unconstitutional bulldozer persecution? I fear not.
Because the court has not explicitly acknowledged, and done nothing to punish or even relay strictures against the political executive that has defiantly and repeatedly sullied its constitutional obligations, by unconstitutionally targeting a particular community to advance its ideological hate project. The court orders no redress, compensation or penalty for the unlawful targeted demolitions of the past four years. The court’s guidelines provide for recovering the cost of the demolished properties from the officials who organise the demolition in the future, but includes no punishment for the political leadership who both order but also valorise this extrajudicial hate project.
There are disturbing echoes in the landmark demolition project of Modi’s India of the demolition of Palestinian properties of the Israeli government. In 2014, the United Nations Special Rapporteur condemned what it called “punitive home demolitions” of Palestinians in occupied territories as “act(s) of collective punishment that contravene international law”. The same is true of India’s targeted extrajudicial demolitions. These call for a profoundly more stern and rigorous intervention by India’s Supreme Court.
After all, what is at stake is nothing less than India’s survival as a secular democracy.
Harsh Mander, justice and peace worker and writer, leads Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s campaign to counter hate violence with love and solidarity. He teaches at FAU University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Heidelberg University, Germany; Vrije University, Amsterdam; and IIM, Ahmedabad.
Also read: “Bulldozer Regime” series in which Scroll’s reporters went back to several victims of “bulldozer injustice” to document the toll of state action on their lives
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