Muslims in India are largely welcoming a ruling this week from the country’s Supreme Court declaring authorities must not demolish any property simply because its owner has been accused of a crime.
Such demolitions — decried as “bulldozer justice” by critics — have targeted mostly Muslim-owned properties in states ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party over the past few years.
On Wednesday, while issuing the verdict, India’s highest court called bulldozer justice “totally unconstitutional” and laid down strict guidelines concerning such demolitions.
“The chilling sight of a bulldozer demolishing a building, when authorities have failed to follow the basic principles of natural justice and have acted without adhering to the principle of due process, reminds one of a lawless state of affairs,” the court said.
Such “high-handed and arbitrary actions” have no place in a constitutional democracy and would be dealt with through the “heavy hand of the law,” the court added.
Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind, a leading organization of Islamic scholars in India, said it welcomes the Supreme Court verdict.
“The court has declared demolishing someone’s house as a crime, and an unacceptable form of punishment. It has also emphasized that the government may not play judge, and only the judiciary has the authority to determine what is legal or illegal,” JUH President Maulana Syed Arshad Madani told VOA.
“This ruling is a victory for justice, and we hope it will serve as a lesson to all authorities,” he said.
After firebrand monk and Hindu nationalist BJP leader Yogi Adityanath became chief minister of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, he ordered his officials to take the strictest possible actions against all criminals.
Soon, the police and other civic officials in Uttar Pradesh started taking strict action against those accused of crimes, including demolishing their properties deemed illegal.
Properties of hard-core criminals were targeted initially. But it was not long until others began losing their properties to demolition for allegedly partaking in protest rallies, pelting stones at others during communal disturbances, slaughtering cows and other offenses.
Over the past few years, houses, shops and other “illegal” structures owned by accused criminals, communal violence rioters and others have been demolished in states including Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Assam and Maharashtra — where the BJP was in power. In most cases, the victims belonged to the minority Muslim community.
According to the Housing and Land Rights Network, a housing rights group, more than 153,000 homes were demolished by various state governments in India, displacing about 738,000 people in the last few years.
Since 2022, JUH filed multiple petitions to the Supreme Court seeking orders to prevent the governments from demolishing properties as a form of extrajudicial punishment.
On September 13, while hearing another petition, the court observed that running a bulldozer on the property of an accused is “akin to bulldozing the law of the land.”
In its verdict on Wednesday, the Supreme Court firmly stated that the executive must not overstep its bounds by acting as a judge and executing punitive measures such as demolitions.
“The executive cannot pronounce a person guilty. Only on the basis of accusation, if the executive demolishes the property of the person, it will strike at the rule of law. The executive cannot become a judge and demolish the properties of the persons accused,” the verdict said.
“No demolition can be carried out without prior show-cause notice and within 15 days from the date of the notice being served,” it said.
New Delhi-based lawyer Mohammad Huzaifa said that this week’s verdict marked a “historic stand against ‘bulldozer justice,’ affirming that punitive demolitions have no place in our democratic framework.”
“While justice may have come too late for many, this ruling offers renewed faith in our judiciary and stands as a beacon of hope for those wronged by arbitrary demolitions impacting scores of people living under the fear of bulldozer state terror,” Huzaifa, a member of the legal team of civil rights group Association for Protection of Civil Rights, told the VOA.
“The challenge now lies in vigilant implementation — true justice will be measured by how effectively these guidelines are enforced on the ground,” he said.
Muslim community leader Zafarul-Islam Khan said he welcomed the verdict although it has come too late.
“Demolition of people’s homes was a huge issue of human rights violation. Courts should have taken suo motu notice of the cases as soon as those demolitions began some years ago,” Khan, former chairman of the Delhi Minorities Commission, told VOA.
“No doubt, the authorities will not feel so free as before in demolishing homes in the future, but they may still look for their devious ways to do so,” he said.
The verdict, in some ways still sounds not complete, Khan added.
“This welcome verdict will remain incomplete unless and until tens of thousands of the previous victims are also compensated and the powerful people who violated the law at will are punished,” he said.
Human rights activist Harsh Mander said that he was relieved that the Supreme Court had spoken out against a process that was “entirely unlawful and unconstitutional.”
“State injustice bulldozing the homes and shops of the working poor has continued for decades, and periodic orders to follow the compassionate due process from the Supreme Court similar to the recent order have not restrained the executive,” Mander told VOA.
“But my problem with the ruling is that it doesn’t act effectively to deter the current form of demolition, which is essentially targeting a particular community, Indian Muslims. I would have wanted the court to both reprimand and punish political leaders who order and justify such unlawful retributive targeting, and officers who implemented these acts.”
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