On Thursday, the administration mercilessly razed 300 houses in a combing operation of bulldozers in Nagina Colony in Lalkuan of Nainital district in Uttarakhand. There are about four thousand people residing in houses here and the railway has uprooted them. It is one of the grosses violations of people’s rights, breaking constitutional norms. On the pretext of  encroachment, heavy police[Read More…]

The extremely cruel deaths of a mother and her daughter in the course of a demolition drive in Marauli village of Kanpur Dehat ( Uttar Pradesh) has disturbed the conscience of even those people who normally remain silent on such injustices against the poor, and condemnations have been coming in from far and wide. Reports have pointed out how demolitions[Read More…]

The plight of slum dwellers is aggravating day by day with the advent of Bulldozer Raj, with their lives literally placed at a razors edge. Without formulating any alternative arrangements for rehabilitation, notices are continuously being issued to demolish all the slums in Delhi. It has placed the poor labourer families in jeopardy, with a housing crisis. Path has been[Read More…]

Can the Guwahati High Court’s Judgement on ‘Illegal Demolitions’  act as a break to the growing normalisation of ‘Bulldozer Justice’ ? There are interventions of courts which occasionally reverberate across the country. The recent judgement of the Guwahati High Court which had suo moto taken up a petition regarding ‘illegal demolitions’ of houses in Village Salonabari, Nagaon district in Assam[Read More…]

It looks all too eerily similar as a method: the expulsion of individuals from their home, the demolition of said home and the punishing of entire families.  All excused by a harsh reading of local regulations.  But this method, used by Israeli authorities for years against vulnerable Palestinians, has become a weapon of choice for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata[Read More…]

by Naveen Tewari and Sandeep Pandey A recent full front page of the advertisement by a Bhartiya Janata Party government declares, ‘House is not just a word. It is a place where power to dream comes and aspirations are fulfilled. Home is much about dignity and security than it is about shelter.’ It further goes on to quote Narendra Modi,[Read More…]

In a letter released on June 14 and sent to the Supreme Court with the names of former Law Minister Shanti Bhushan and six former judges as well as some senior advocates and legal luminaries the recent repressive actions against  protestors, including demolitions, in Uttar Pradesh have been called illegal. Shanti Bhushan was Law Minister during 1977-79 and had worked[Read More…]

In editorials published on 14 June, several leading newspapers have expressed deep regret at the highly selective use of bulldozers to damage or demolish houses or other buildings related to or belonging to protesters. The Tribune has written an editorial appropriately titled ‘Free run for bulldozers—Bypassing of due process a dangerous trend ’. This editorial has written, “ The no-holds[Read More…]

True, individuals can be paid, ideals “sold”, dreams “auctioned”, democratic values “bartered”, independence of media “pawned” and more- at a price and at several levels by leaders to spread communal tension. But the same cannot be said of secularism of all Indians. At this stage, attempts by people to display their “secularism” through peace-marches and other moves together with certain[Read More…]

When Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister was posing for pictures, adventurously sitting atop a bulldozer in the new JCB factory inaugurated recently in Gujarat, little did he realise (or, did he deliberately choose to ignore?) that only a few days earlier, similar bulldozers were deployed by the local authorities to demolish buildings in the Jahangirpuri colony in New Delhi[Read More…]

The recent period has seen a series of events, where bulldozers were used in Muslim areas. This started in Khargone in Madhya Pradesh and later in Jehangirpuri in Delhi. Both of these follow a similar pattern. The Hindu mobs enter the Muslim locations on the pretext of yatra either Ram Navami or Hanuman Jayanti. The mobs instead of going to[Read More…]