By Harsh Mander
When the history of our times is written, a paramount marker of Narendra Modi’s first term in office as India’s prime minister would be of the lynch mob. In his second term lynching did not ebb, but with it surged sometimes genocidal hate speech and the bulldozer transformed into a weapon of lawless state terror targeting India’s Muslim citizens.
After Uttar Pradesh’s combative Chief Minister Adityanath first weaponised the bulldozer to destroy, in a loop, the properties and the morale of Muslim citizens, other Bharatiya Janata Party chief ministers, in Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Assam, emulated him. Bulldozers also smashed Muslim properties in Delhi, a state in which the police are directly controlled by the Union government.
The bulldozer fast grew into a symbol of decisive masculinist governance untrammelled by constitutional and legal niceties in the necessary war against Indian Muslims. Young men tattooed bulldozers on their arms and flaunted bulldozers on their T-shirts and caps. Bulldozers front-ended triumphalist election rallies. The demolitions were often sites of frenzied festivity, with dancing onlookers and loud celebratory music.
For the record, municipal and district officials would usually claim that bulldozers were rolled in to destroy homes only in routine drives against unlawful encroachments. They would not explain why only some properties were targeted while hundreds of others in the vicinity with the same contested legality were untouched. Hiding as they did behind back-dated notices, they also would not explain the suddenness of the demolitions, why these immediately followed communal skirmishes or protests by Muslims.
But political leaders were mostly much more candid. They gloated that they sent out bulldozers to extend exemplary and immediate punishment to wrong-doers. In 2022, after many Muslim properties were razed in Khargone following a skirmish in Khargone, Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Narottam Mishra for instance boasted, “Jis ghar se patthar aaye hain, us ghar ko pattharon ka hi ghar banayenge.” Whichever homes were involved in stone pelting, we will turn into piles of stones. Chief ministers would throw words like “rioters”, “criminals” and “mafia” to signal proudly that their targets were Muslims who needed to be suppressed and tamed.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
