India’s home demolitions wipe off ‘labour of generations’

NUH, India – As India celebrates its 77th independence day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke on August 15 from the ramparts of Red Fort in New Delhi, paying homage to pre-independence freedom fighters and promising a bright future for 1.5 billion Indians.

Just an hour’s drive away, however, the future for hundreds of Indian Muslim families looks bleak.

On August 8, 60-year-old Khurshidan sat under a tree, sobbing inconsolably. Next to her lay a heap of debris — the remnants of her home, the latest target of Haryana state's most recent demolition drive launched on August 3.

The only possession that escaped the state’s wrath was her 5-year-old grandson's tricycle, which was parked under the same tree where the family of 16 is now taking shelter.

The district of Nuh, 63 kilometres from New Delhi, came under the media spotlight in early August, when it was gripped by a frenzy of communal violence that left six dead and hundreds of others injured.

Muslims blamed far-right Hindu extremist groups for orchestrating the violence and targeting Muslim villages and neighbourhoods. In response, Hindus blamed Muslims for pelting their procession with stones on July 31, causing rioting.

The Haryana police detained dozens of men in the following days and demolished at least 1,208 properties, including homes, shops and kiosks as part of a popular trend in north Indian states run by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) known as “bulldozer justice”.

Dismissing criticism, the BJP-led Haryana government says that the demolition drive was not an act of reprisal against Muslims, but rather an initiative to remove illegal settlements in the violence-ridden Nuh district.

Formerly known as Mewat, Nuh is a Muslim-majority district in the Hindu-majority Haryana state. Prior to India gaining its independence in 1947, the place symbolised Hindu-Muslim unity. After the bloody partition severed the social contract between the two communities, the Muslims of Mewat, commonly known as Meos, considered moving out of the district and migrating to Pakistan. But it was on the insistence and assurance of India's founding father Mahatma Gandhi, who called Meo Muslims the “backbone of India,” that the majority of them decided to stay in India.

Seven decades after India attained its independence, their grandchildren are now living in fear and uncertainty.

“The violence happened at least one kilometre away from here. But the police alleged that stones were pelted on the yatris (pilgrims) from my house. Can we throw a stone as far as 1 kilometre away? They said we were hiding weapons. They said I was helping those involved in violence, was serving them water,” Khurshidan tells TRT World.

“Within an hour of serving a notice, more than 250 police personnel came and started the demolition. We were not given any time to collect our belongings. Everything was razed to the ground.”

The 1990s migration

India’s record for protecting minorities has been patchy since it became an independent nation state. Critics allege that, under BJP rule, far-right Hindu nationalist groups have felt emboldened to carry out acts of violence against Muslims, Christians and Dalits. The violence in Nuh was yet another reflection of the decades-old trend.

On August 7, a regional court took up the case on its own, criticising the Haryana government for exercising "ethnic cleansing" and asking whether the properties of a "particular community" — a common reference for Muslims in India — were being targeted "under the guise of a law and order problem.” Soon after, the government stopped the demolition drive.

Indian civil servant and Deputy Commissioner in Nuh district Dhirendra Khadgata tells TRT World that the matter is subjudice and that he will not divulge any information until the court hearing on August 18.

“We are supposed to submit all the details to the Punjab and Haryana High Court. Before that, I cannot tell you anything,” he says.

Khurshidan, a widow with two daughters and two sons, moved to Nuh from a village in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan in the early 1990s. They were landless farmers who worked long, arduous shifts in return for such little money that they were never able to even feed themselves.

In Nuh, they settled on a patch of forest land in Nalhar, where they eventually built a four-room home. It took them three decades to build that shelter with a proper roof over their heads. Khurshidan’s family grew as her children got married. The son-in-laws moved in with them. She now has seven grandchildren from her sons and daughters.

Although Khurshidan admits that the family lived in an illegal settlement and did not possess any property documents, she finds it odd that her home was targeted in the demolition drive since millions of such settlements have become commonplace in India.

In much of India, the illegal construction boom has been ongoing for several decades as various economic and climate-related factors such as long droughts have provoked internal migration, changing the demographic makeup of urban centres and nearby areas. The migration of poor, landless people has led to the mushrooming of slums in cities like New Delhi and Mumbai. Even middle-class Indians, whose spending power increased post-1990s economic liberalisation, have ended up building spacious apartment buildings, commonly known as “unauthorised colonies.”

The demolition of properties overwhelmingly owned by Muslims in Nuh following the communal violence has raised concerns that the state government is pursuing a political vendetta, especially in light of the millions of illegal settlements that remain untouched across the country. In New Delhi alone, at least 5 million people live in illegal shelters across 175 square kilometres.

Human rights activists have repeatedly urged state governments to desist from arbitrary demolitions of such settlements. Legal experts and political scientists have also highlighted numerous Supreme Court judgments where the Right to Shelter has been recognised as an integral part of the Right to Life.

The first night after her home was smashed into pieces, Khurshidan and her family braved a long spell of rain. “We didn’t have enough plastic to cover ourselves with, so we covered the children. The rest of us were out in the open and completely drenched. Some of my family members fell sick the next day,” she says.

Visibly shaken, her grandchildren haven’t gone to school since they lost their home.

As per local media reports, not every demolished house in Nuh was illegally built. Some targeting Muslim properties had reportedly been funded and approved under state and federal government programmes.

In the village of Nalhar, the government knocked down at least 250 houses — some were illegal and some legal, but all were owned by Muslims, according to local activist and lawyer Ramzan Chaudhry.

In the neighbourhood of Ferozpur Jhirka, TRT World learned from local sources that only three houses owned by Hindus were demolished as opposed to the dozens of Muslim-owned properties that were razed to the ground.

“A political and economic terror tactic”

New Delhi-based lawyer Kawalpreet Kaur, who has extensively worked on labour, housing and land rights, says that bulldozers are being used rampantly — from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam to Haryana's Nuh — with the sole purpose of “crushing Muslims” for electoral dividends.

Every BJP-governed state, Kaur says, wants to associate itself with this act.

“It’s not just inhumane; it is illegal and unconstitutional,” she tells TRT World.

“Even for ‘illegally constructed’ houses or slums, the demolitions without any notice are illegal and have no place in any constitutional democracy.”

Such coercive measures cause feelings of helplessness among residents. While children live with the fear of becoming homeless, parents struggle to deal with their own trauma as they constantly feel defenceless and unable to protect their children. These demolitions also leave a major financial burden on them, reversing decades of capital gains, and pushing them back to below poverty margins.

Ghazala Jamil, an assistant professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, has written extensively about bulldozer drives across India. She calls this practice “a political and economic terror tactic”, which impacts the “economic standing of families,” upending local businesses.

“Cobbling together a shelter or an informal petty livelihood can take years,” Jamil tells TRT World. “Building a proper house can take decades. The demolitions wipe off the labour of generations.”

Communal violence that disproportionately affects Indian Muslims destroys “entire industries in towns where Muslim artisans undertook traditional skill-based occupations.”

“This kind of terror has also led Muslims to believe that they don't have the protection of law because courts have failed to take serious cognisance of municipal authorities flouting all procedures to punish people of invented crimes,” she says.

Ramazan Chaudhary, an activist in Nuh, says that the recent spate of violence has left a deep psychological wound in the Meo Muslim community. Citing a incident in which far-right Hindu mobs vandalised one of the oldest shops run by a Meo Muslim in a village called Palwal, he says that the shop owner, an artisan who was famous for his bangle work, was among the Muslims who stayed in India, refusing to move to Pakistan in 1947.

“Imagine violence and demolitions are now targeting those who chose to stay in India when their brethren were leaving for Pakistan. It is happening to those who chose country over religion.”