New Delhi: Rajasthan authorities’ demolishing the home where the family of a Muslim boy accused of stabbing his Hindu classmate lived on Saturday (August 17) amounts to “nothing less than goonda raj”, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) has said in a letter to the chief justice of the Rajasthan high court.
News reports have said the state’s forest department issued a notice to the accused’s family on Saturday morning saying the house they lived in in Udaipur encroached on forest land.
According to the Rajasthan PUCL’s letter, the notice, which was dated Friday, gave the family time till Tuesday (August 20) to vacate their home, but the authorities demolished the house later on Saturday anyway.
“It is worthwhile to mention here that there are more than 200 houses constructed in the said locality; however, only the family of the juvenile in conflict with law is being targeted by the state authorities,” the PUCL said in its letter.
The rights organisation noted that the accused’s family was not given time to approach the high court and that the authorities’ “pick and choose” approach violated the family’s fundamental rights as well as the principles of natural justice.
“If this is allowed to be continued, we firmly believe that the day is not far when the executive will bulldoze even the courts of law who are passing orders against their government,” the PUCL wrote, alleging that the demolition gave a “communal colour” to the alleged stabbing.
Seeking Rajasthan high court CJ Justice M.M. Shrivastava’s intervention, the PUCL asked that he issue directions for the accused’s family to be rehabilitated.
It also demanded that “strict action” be taken against those officers that ordered the demolition and that the investigation in the case be monitored by the high court as the “police and administration have shown their extreme bias against the accused, even prior to the investigation”.
Internet services blocked, curfew in Udaipur after stabbing leads to communal tensions
According to news reports, the 15-year-old accused Muslim boy stabbed his Hindu classmate in a school in Udaipur on Friday.
He was later booked under the Juvenile Justice Act and his father was also arrested, news reports said, and the PUCL noted that the father’s arrest was for unknown reasons.
Hindu organisations then took to the streets to protest the stabbing and closed markets in the city, following which incidents of arson and stone-pelting also occurred, BBC Hindi reported.
Authorities imposed a curfew in the city and suspended some internet services for a day after the unrest broke out. They extended the internet clampdown by another day on Saturday because they were not able to control the spread of false or provocative content on social media, The Hindu reported.
Schools have been shut in the city until further notice.
A report in the Indian Express said that the Muslim boy’s family were tenants in their home, and a video that emerged after the incident shows a man identifying himself as their landlord saying that four other families also lived there.
The newspaper quoted a police officer as saying that the home’s owner “was not able to provide any form of ownership document”, following which it was destroyed on Saturday by a joint team of the forest department and the Udaipur municipal corporation.
First seen in Uttar Pradesh under chief minister Yogi Adityanath, who has been called “bulldozer baba”, the phenomenon of ‘bulldozer justice’ has since spread to Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, Assam, Uttarakhand and Mumbai.
From demolitions following communal riots, to forced evictions over allegations of encroachment, this ‘bulldozer justice’ has defined the delivery of justice in the Modi years.
