In India’s heartland, this is how Hindu far-right is bulldozing Muslims

Madhya Pradesh, India: Up until a few months back, 17-year-old Zeenat Qureshi was like any of the tens of millions of girls her age in India. She was poor and had to help her mother in their brick home in a village in Madya Pradesh and tend to the cattle. But she had a family, her things, and friends.

Zeenat died on August 9. She died of pneumonia, a doctor told her family. She got sick after getting drenched in the rain. It wasn’t like she wanted to get wet. She didn’t have any choice but to brave the downpour. Zeenat was among dozens of people living in the open in Bhainswahi village. All of them are Muslims, and the authorities bulldozed their homes.

Her father attended the funeral in handcuffs with policemen by his side. This is a story of how India’s government built homes for the poorest segment of society and then bulldozed them based on religion.

And it all started with the rumour of an injured cow.

In the early hours of June 15, dozens of armed police officers descended on Bhainswahi village in Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh, a large province smack in the middle of India.

Police officers, wielding guns and batons, cordoned off a part of the Muslim-dominated village and ordered everyone to come out of their houses.

“They didn’t even give us time to collect (our) children’s school books or our valuables,” says Aliya Bano, a 30-year-old mother.

"My daughters begged the police to let them save their school things…their uniforms, their books – everything is buried under there now," she tells TRT World, gesturing to the pile of debris.

A few hours later, authorities brought in bulldozers and razed at least 16 houses into piles of rubble as women and children wailed and protested nearby. They were all Muslim homes.

“Our entire life savings are gone- all the money my husband worked so hard for – it's all in there," says Gulshan Bano, another victim, her eyes fixed on the ruins of her demolished home.

What happened in Bhainswahi village is a stark reminder of how constitutionally secular India has become hostage to Hindu right-wing groups, which are regularly inciting religious sentiment for political and electoral gains.

At the centre of it is an allegation that Muslims slaughter cows, considered sacred in Hindu religious mythology.

Several states have banned cow slaughter since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. Violators can be punished with imprisonment for up to 3 years.

Over the years, Hindu extremist groups or cow vigilantes have taken it upon themselves to ‘protect’ cows, which freely roam the roads in many cities, including India’s IT hub of Bangalore.

Vigilantes often set up unauthorised checkposts on roads and highways, stopping trucks to check if cows are being transported.

In a matter of weeks in June this year, ten incidents were reported where mobs attacked people transporting cattle.

In a 2019 report, the rights group Human Rights Watch said more than two-thirds of the people killed by radical vigilantes were Muslims. Last year, a video went viral in which a Muslim truck driver was hacked to death in the middle of the road in Bihar.

Ironically, Bhainswahi means ‘buffalo’ in Hindi. A few days before the police ‘operation’, a cow had allegedly jumped out of a truck in Mandla and was dragged along the road.

Members of Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad, right-wing groups aligned with Modi’s BJP, took to the streets in protest. The cow was being transported to be slaughtered in Bhainswahi, they said and demanded that police register a case and investigate it. They had threatened to take their protest to the Muslim-majority parts of Bhainswahi if the police didn’t act.

What followed has become a neverending nightmare for scores of Muslims.

A meaty nightmare

“Cow meat? Yes, look here; there’s so much of it everywhere. You can even see it today,” says Aliya Bano. The irony in her words does not escape her gestures toward a pile of concrete, twisted iron rebars and clothes in the ruins of what was once her home.

Bano looks much older than her three decades, her weather-beaten face creased with weariness from the years of hard labour. Her husband is a junk scrap dealer, and she helps him out with that.

A month after the demolitions, TRT World visited the village, which requires a 17-hour-long train journey from New Delhi to Jabalpur and then a three-hour drive to reach the village.

Police have since arrested at least 11 Muslim men and implicated them in cases related to illegal butchering and sale of cows. But the family of the detainees and others in the neighbourhood denied slaughtering cows.

Locals say they only milked cows.

“We had four animals—a cow, a goat, a cat, and a dog. The police only took the cow. I had never seen so many police in one place in my life. They didn’t let us take anything from our house,” says Bano.

Local activists and journalists say the whole police operation was nothing more than an appeasement campaign in which officials try to score points with their superiors by trying to enforce Hindutva ideology.

The raid and the demolitions occurred at a time when Muslims in India, like the rest of the Muslim world, were preparing for Eid al Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, during which they slaughter sheep, goats and cows.

Neha Pachisia, the sub-divisional police officer of Nainpur, tells TRT World that cow meat and hides were found in some of the homes owned by Muslims.

“We were very amazed to find meat buried in holes in the ground, in fridges and found cow hides.”

Locals deny that the police had found anything to do with cows.

“They (the police) found nothing in my home, yet they bulldozed it”, says Sultana Bi, who works as a labourer. "My husband works in scrap collection, and I am a manual labourer too. We handle various tasks for the gram panchayat, and our daughter helps too," Bi explains.

Whose bones are they anyway?

But even if meat and bones were found, how could police be sure that they belonged to a cow and not a buffalo?

“We can tell by looking at bones, horns and skulls,” says police officer Pachisia when TRT World pressed her for an explanation. “ We could directly see cows tied, cow bones, cow skulls- these are enough evidence to prove and start the probe on the spot.”

She refused to comment on the forensic report of samples collected from Bhainswahi village and sent for analysis to a lab to establish that cows were slaughtered and illegally traded there.

The Muslim men have been arrested for violating the 2004 Cow Protection Act. Their families have approach the high court, after a lower court rejected their plea.

Sultana Bi and her four children are living in a makeshift tent, barely 6 by 6 feet in size, near the rubble of their home, hoping that their misery will end soon.

“I just want my husband to come home. I have young daughters; where will I go with them? No one is willing to host us. Our relatives and friends are scared that we will bring trouble to their doorstep,” Sultana Bi says.

Even in the absence of any evidence or court conviction, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the right-wing group that agitated the matter, is convinced that Bhainswahi was the epicentre of cow slaughter.

“For 30 years, we have known what happens in Bhainswahi,” says Sonal Barman, chief spokesperson of the VHP’s Mandla unit.

“Bulldozing their homes is not enough. We want them hanged,” Barman adds.

The path from an injured cow to the demolition of 16 houses is a short and stark one, highlighting the volatile intersection of religious sentiments, cow vigilantism, and official action that seems to be growing in the state of Madhya Pradesh.

Dozens of Muslim-owned houses and buildings have been demolished in different parts of Madhya Pradesh over the week of Eid celebrations. This happened in various districts like Mandla, Jaora, Ratlam, Seoni, and Morena.

However, India’s cow protection laws have no provision for demolishing someone’s house - a tactic being regularly used to target Muslim protestors and descendants in recent years.

Instead, what Indian authorities do is use flimsy accusations that homes were illegally constructed. But in Bhainswahi, police and the Hindu right-wing groups hadn’t considered a small but significant detail.

The government’s gift

Among the 16 demolished houses, six of them were built under PM Awas Yojana and three under Indira Awas Yojana – two federally-funded projects aimed at providing low-cost housing to the economically weaker sections of society.

Asiya Bano, whose house falls under the PM Awas Yojana, says, “They are saying that our homes were illegally built. How come these were illegal if they were given by the government?” Aliya Bano, whose house comes under the Indira Awas Yojana, says, “ Modi gave us these houses, and he is the one who took them from us.” When police officer Neha Pachisia was asked about the demolition of houses built under government schemes, she stopped the interview midway and asked this correspondent to take up the matter with higher authorities.

The Bhainswahi demolitions have drawn attention to Madhya Pradesh's new Chief Minister, Mohan Yadav, and his political moorings in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological fountainhead of most Hindu rightwing groups in India, including the BJP.

Yadav, who assumed office in December 2023, has been vocal about his commitment to Hindutva ideology. Many saw his appointment as CM as a signal of the BJP's intention to pursue a more assertive Hindu nationalist agenda in the state. "Let's be clear - this isn't about enforcing laws or proving anyone's loyalty," Gauhar Raza, an Indian scientist and social activist, states. "Chief Minister Yadav isn't trying to prove himself to anyone. He's a product of the RSS, he is the RSS through and through." "The 'Bulldozer Raj' is not just about demolitions - it's a campaign of terror against Muslims," Raza states. He sees the actions in Madhya Pradesh as calculated steps towards a more sinister goal: "They're trying to make it impossible for Muslims and Hindus to coexist peacefully. It's the Hindutva ideology gaining ground in the state and its actions."

"By destroying homes and seizing land, the state is sending a clear message to Hindus - 'We're on your side against the Muslims.' But make no mistake, this is part of a much larger, more dangerous plan. These actions are laying the groundwork for potential genocide", Raza explains.

The events in Bhainswahi bear a striking resemblance to incidents in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh under Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Since 2017, the UP government has frequently employed bulldozers to demolish properties allegedly linked to criminals or built illegally, often targeting Muslim communities.

"What's happening in BJP-ruled states isn't just similar to Uttar Pradesh under Yogi Adityanath. The real blueprint for this comes from Nazi Germany," Raza asserts. "Hitler used bulldozers too. It's a dark and chilling similarity."