Even though Justice Lau Nageswara Rao, former Supreme Court justice, was only two months away from retiring after serving on the nation's top court for six years in April 2022, he could not have seen the State disobeying the judiciary in such a blatant manner.
On April 20, 2022, Rao and fellow judge Justice BR Gavai stayed the ongoing demolitions in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri locality by the Delhi Municipal Corporation. The display of the State’s bulldozer might kickstarted within four days of communal violence, which erupted in a hackneyed fashion when a Hindu religious procession, armed with guns and swords while shouting provocative slogans, passed a mosque.
The two judges passed their order after lawyers informed them that the bulldozers had continued the action despite Chief Justice of India NV Ramanna ordering the previous day, the immediate cessation of the demolition drive and maintenance of status quo.
Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal, representing Muslim cleric body Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, asked the two judges for an order having national applicability. Justice Rao politely reprimanded Sibal: “Once we have passed orders in one case, you still think something will happen?”
Well, it did happen, not once but innumerable times. Not after 16 months when Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar’s regime let loose the demolition squad in Nuh, the State’s only district with a Muslim population of more than 50 per cent (79 per cent to be precise), but almost from the word go.
Before Nuh, the same sequence was seen in June 2022 in Prayagraj where houses were specifically targeted following violence during a protest against former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Nupur Sharma's derogatory remarks against Muhammad. Unsurprisingly, Sharma was provided police protection.
Within a month of this incident, bulldozers rolled out in Kanpur. The targets this time too were the properties of a local Muslim businessman. His offence? Leading protests against Sharma.
Whether a remote place in Assam bordering Arunachal Pradesh, a locality in the western city of Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh, or Gujarat’s Himmatnagar district and even elsewhere, the stories were strikingly similar.
Due to a back story involving violence between Muslim(s) and Hindu(s), the local authorities with alacrity would discover within days the ‘illegality’ of a Muslim-owned building or mosque.
Such buildings were quickly razed to the ground in full public glare, courtesy unquestioning television news channels. It is mostly done in broad daylight, where the State is putting up a "performance" while the police are overseeing these operations. The intention was (and is) clear — send a message to the BJP’s majoritarian supporters and convey to Muslims that they have been vanquished. "We are fixing the Muslims" is the message the BJP communicates to people who feed on hate.
Unauthorised constructions, like jumping traffic signals, are rampant violations of the law that is sadly prevalent across India, and it cannot be pinned to one region or religion. However, this brazen partisan approach by the State has been perfected since 2017 by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
Adityanath decided to be an unabashed, in-your-face Hindutva leader and declared that he would peer like a hawk for the corrupt and criminals. As this was announced alongside the formation of ‘anti-Romeo squads’ to prevent ‘love jihad’, the intention was clear — more focussed targeting of Muslims among the corrupt and those involved in crimes.
Soon, Adityanath became a role model for those who were either looking to carve out their individuality in the over-centralised BJP, or those who required to consolidate their slipping electoral base. Adityanath, of course, was the trailblazer, and he has clones following him: Himanta Biswa Sarma, Shivraj Chouhan in his term since March 2020, Basavaraj Bommai who was more pro-Hindutva than any of his predecessors in Karnataka, and now the besieged Khattar.
The tactic is the same — make it appear that only the Muslims in India construct properties illegally. The paradox is that these demolitions are conducted by the State apparatus violating laws themselves. An illegal act is "punished" by another illegal act!
Whether the case of the Jahangirpuri demolitions (it included a mosque too which was damaged in the bulldozer drive) or the recent demolitions in Nuh, these are all "retaliatory" actions of State agencies. These are retributive strikes for "alleged use of the property in question" by rioters who are portrayed as having provoked violence by throwing stones at processions taken out by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal or a vigilante group.
In the Hindutva narrative, the Muslims are increasingly portrayed as the only ones who commit crimes that enable BJP to consolidate its majoritarian electoral constituency. ‘Love jihad’ involves a deliberate conspiracy of Muslim youth to seduce "innocent" Hindu girls, polygamy, maltreatment of wives by instantaneous divorce, and forced conversion are depicted as crimes that the average Muslim man is specialised in.
Given the endless cycle of demolitions under police protection, it is time to knock once again at the Supreme Court’s doors. True that the Haryana High Court stayed the demolitions in Nuh, near Gurugram, on August 8, but there is no knowing if all the high courts will exhibit similar autonomy all the time. The high court’s order halting demolitions is important for four reasons:
One, it is the court's suo moto action — the judges’ collective conscience was rattled by what was taking place. Two, the order refers to Haryana Home Minister Anil Vij's boast that the bulldozers are part of the "ilaj" (treatment) that the government is using while probing and acting. Three, that the judges recalled Lord Acton's famous dictum: power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, which suggests that arrogance has become the primary characteristic of the current regime. Four, and this is the most significant, the judges asked if these demolitions were "an exercise of ethnic cleansing being conducted by the State"! These are not words from either the Opposition or the ruling party, but observations by the esteemed high court judges.
It is time for the Supreme Court to issue an order that has national applicability without any further delay. It must prohibit all retributive demolitions by State agencies, especially in the aftermath of an episode of communal violence.
(Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a Delhi-based journalist, is author of ‘The Demolition and the Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India’. Twitter: @NilanjanUdwin)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.