On the September 16, the Supreme Court of India gave an interim order halting all demolitions till its next hearing on October 1. Ironically, since the beginning of this month, just as the Supreme Court was hearing petitions against arbitrary demolitions, Hindutva outfits were staging large demonstrations demanding the demolition of a mosque in Shimla’s Sanjauli. Violent demonstrations in Himachal Pradesh’s capital erupted following an alleged assault on a businessman in Malyana village on August 31. While the police promptly arrested six people for the assault, calls to demolish the mosque began soon after. Although nothing in law connects the assault to the demands for the mosque’s demolition, similar demands – for demolition of ‘illegal mosques’ – have spread to other towns of Himachal.
To understand what is happening in Shimla, we should look at the pattern observed in all instances of bulldozer politics – from Jahangirpuri to Surat. The story begins with a trigger event – a provocation, protest, violence, or a disturbance that creates communal tensions in the area. Immediately following the trigger, political rhetoric starts promoting ‘bulldozer justice’ as punishment for the Muslims alleged to have been involved in the disturbance. A few days later, the local development authority, using bulldozers and the police, demolishes properties by invoking municipal development norms and building by-laws.
Bulldozer politics follows a mechanism through which development norms and building bye-laws – often understood as civil laws – are criminalised. Domicide – the deliberate destruction of architecture done to induce suffering on people – works through a coalition of two seemingly detached arms of the government and two seemingly different sets of legal instruments, that is, the police and the development authority, and penal codes and building bye-laws.
First, Muslims are criminalised in rhetoric and accused of being perpetrators of violence under the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita – which of course has no provision of demolition as a punitive measure. Immediately after, the civic authorities use ‘development norms’ to enact domicide. These demolitions are justified as a response to illegalities in civil law. While the Supreme Court is set to form guidelines to prevent this misuse of law, till now, courts have treated each case of demolition not as the (illegal) delivery of retribution – despite politicians proclaiming them to be so – but through the lens of development norms, thus leaving the victims of domicide with only procedural legal arguments.
Also read: Haryana Rally Shows That SC Orders No Bar to Adityanath’s Association With Bulldozers
In this ‘bulldozer politics’, the state exploits the fact that most buildings in Indian cities – including many government buildings – are ‘illegal’ in one way or the other and then selectively uses this status against Muslims. Last June, in MP’s Mandla, for example, the state government demolished only 11 out of 27 homes in a neighbourhood that was allegedly built on government land. When asked about the reason for leaving the other 16 homes untouched, the SHO of the area stated that only the homes where beef was allegedly found have been demolished. Similarly, in Shimla, the mosque under question is allegedly illegal since it has more floors than the Floor Space Index (FSI) norms of the area allow. Building more floor space than allowed by FSI norms is another common occurrence in Indian towns.
More importantly, Indian cities have very demanding and arduously descriptive building by-laws and the state exercises coercive powers over the built environment and regulations of private property. In India, where nearly 30% of the population earns less than Rs 10,000 per month and almost two million people in cities are homeless, a ‘legal’ building that meets all the area and ventilation requirements, which has been designed by competent professionals and gone through approval procedures, is unaffordable for many.
Additionally, the very nature of street life in India, with vendors and shrines extending their functioning to the street, makes those structures ‘illegal.’ India’s coercive development norms, coupled with poverty and homelessness, therefore, render a large section of its population vulnerable to the state’s mercy. At their kindest, bureaucrats use building violations as a tool of rent seeking and harassment and at their mightiest, authorise demolitions to fulfil the rhetoric of the political class.
You might spend all your life in a house that violates building codes in some way and might never realise it until the state decides to use those violations against you.
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The ongoing events in Shimla take domicide a step further by politically socialising the phenomenon of bulldozer punishment. Political socialisation is the process through which certain values of politics become part of everyday life and public opinion. Political socialisation can be an egalitarian process in instances where the political values seek to liberate an oppressed community such as social acceptance of queer people. In deeply damaging cases such as bulldozer politics, political socialisation means that the society at large has internalised the fact that demolishing Muslim homes is a possible tool of collective punishment.
While historically, domicide has been a tool of state violence – the British government’s demolitions after the 1857 rebellion, Indira Gandhi’s slum demolitions during the Emergency, and the BJP’s reinvention of domicidal violence five years ago – the demonstrations calling for domicide in Shimla show that ‘bulldozer justice’ has become a part of popular political consciousness. In states ruled by the BJP, the governments quickly fulfil this majoritarian desire for collective punishment and now, in Congress-ruled Himachal Pradesh, majoritarian civilian demonstrations are demanding domicidal violence on Muslims. After days of threats, the mosque’s imam and a panel of Muslim leaders have offered to voluntarily demolish unauthorised parts of the mosque in Sanjauli. However, similar demonstrations have emerged in other towns.
As we approach the Supreme Court’s next hearing on arbitrary demolitions, it is important to be alert to the fact that nearly five years of the glorification of bulldozer politics through popular media and rhetoric has enabled the metastasis of domicide in the popular opinion of Indian society. While the bulldozer was limited as an instrument of state violence till now, Shimla shows that it is spreading outwards from the realms of the state and the epicentres of alleged violence to wider social imaginations of collective punishment. While, on the surface, nothing connects the assault in Malyana to the demands of demolition of the mosque in Sanjauli, the two are connected through the criminalisation of Muslims as a community at large, a coalitionary functioning of the legal apparatus and a majoritarian desire for spectacular violence on Muslims in India.
Fahad Zuberi is a doctoral scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and writes about politics, architecture and cities.
