Constructing Muslim Absence: “Bulldozer Justice” in India

In the past few years, the bulldozer politics at work in Palestine have found some dramatic echoes in the mass demolition of Muslim homes across several Indian states. The bulldozer has now become a weapon, a symbol, and a rallying cry for Hindutva: they are showcased in Hindu supremacist events as well as in pop culture, while being continuously at work against Muslim homes that already bear extensive spatial injuries from their neighbors, Hindu militias, and the police. In this extensive and poetic text, Shivangi Mariam Raj uses her research to build a theoretical framework to resist the order of the rubble.

The night’s ear grows
thick with blood and stone,
calls us in to descend
into its wheatfield labyrinth,
stars exploding into whispers,
we march into its listening.

In Mandla (Madhya Pradesh), eleven Muslim homes were demolished because the police found beef in their owners’ refrigerators and cows in their backyards. In Allahabad, renamed by the Uttar Pradesh government as Prayagraj, they sent the bulldozers to tear Afreen Fatima’s home apart. In Mahbubnagar (Telangana), the municipality pulled down 75 homes in a Dalit colony in early morning hours, leaving more than two dozen disabled families homeless as well. In Nuh (Haryana), within five days, more than a thousand Muslim homes, shanties, and small businesses were bulldozed, followed by the arrests of more than a hundred Muslim locals – the state government dismissively insisted that it was merely “following the due procedure of law.”

Wherever we turn, we are greeted by an absence: absence of a house that once stood proud of growing into a home, absence of a mosque where the elderly gathered with their evening complaints, all the windows that eavesdropped on children’s secrets are gone, the cold stone embracing the shrine with its roses and incense is gone, rooms and all the fingers that once touched them are now mist.

Wherever we turn, crime scenes stare back at us; concrete, brick, and iron are now phantoms that cast their long blue shadow on our days. What should be the architecture of our grief?

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Bulldozers were seared into these landscapes long before they formally arrived. The ghettos Muslims are pushed inside, cramped and congested, teeming with thousands of inhabitants packed into a tight square kilometer, heaving from Zakir Nagar to Mumbra, from Juhapura to Jamia Nagar, have already been writhing with spatial wounding. Segregated and secluded, over 200 million Muslims of India are not allowed to rent or purchase houses in certain neighborhoods – even formalized with legislations such as the Disturbed Areas Act in Gujarat – workplaces and educational institutions practice sanitized forms of exclusion against the community, the dog whistle of “land jihad” is deployed to impede any economic activities they might undertake, from running a small shop to real estate investments, and even offering prayers in public squares invites punishment for the community across several cities. Labeled as unhygienic, dreaded as terrorist hideouts, often with considerable police or paramilitary presence, denied civic infrastructure and basic amenities, and derided for their cultural backwardness, everyday life in these sequestered localities is stigmatized.

These topographies of segregation begin to gradually deform and reconfigure certain spatial elements, as was observed during the 2020 anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi, where rooftops and drains were weaponized by Hindu neighbors as well as mobs of outsiders to attack Muslim homes and shops and dispose their charred, stabbed bodies. Over the last three years, new routines of spatial violence have been intensified across at least twelve states where Hindu supremacist groups, armed with axes, knives, hammers, saws, swords, guns, and batons, blaring offensive songs, and shouting anti-Muslim slogans, take out religious processions through densely-packed Muslim neighborhoods, and construct yet another layer of spatial injury. Accompanied by other state and non-state actors, they attack, loot, burn, desecrate, and destroy Muslim properties. Shops, small businesses, carts, schools, homes, mosques, shrines, libraries, small factories, slums, shanties: nothing is spared. This year, one of the routes of Kanwar Yatra began from Garhmukteshwar with the young pilgrims atop a bulldozer, attacking passersby, boycotting Muslim eateries along the pilgrimage route forced to display their owners’ names, causing traffic disruptions, attempting to storm a madarsa, and destroying property over the course of two weeks. With their rallies, they established fluid spatialities that perpetually generate chaos and yield to it, thereby normalizing their violence and marking their domination as natural and inevitable. Through forms of sonic control enforced by hate speech, Hindutva pop, and regulations on mosque loudspeakers as well as disciplining food practices by prohibiting eating, storing, transporting, or selling beef, space is continuously transformed, and so are the bodies constrained within its layers of ruination. While Muslims are forced to inhabit ghettos to seek safety and shelter from multiple grades of violence, these zones also make them more vulnerable to targeted attacks and massacres as well as renewed calls for economic boycott and expulsion, using their own space against them. In June 2023, Muslims in the Uttarakhand town of Purola were forced to shut their businesses down, had their shops marked with black crosses and threatening posters, and more than a dozen families were compelled to flee, leaving their homes behind.

Whatever remains of this space is further disfigured when the local authorities send bulldozers after these attacks to administer “justice” by razing down the homes of Muslims, who are invariably identified as “rioters” or “masterminds.” In April 2022, after the mobs set several neighborhoods ablaze in Khargone (Madhya Pradesh), Mohammad Nadeem Sheikh was still asleep in his house when it was being demolished by government bulldozers. He and his three brothers were dragged by the police officers, beaten up, and had their clothes torn, despite possessing all the necessary registration documents and permission records for their home and having no involvement in the violence that unfolded against his own community. Bulldozers might comprise a hypervisible scale of violence, but they are merely the condensation of all other spatial layers of exclusion and annihilation, exposing what had remained previously concealed. With multiple public speeches and statements calling for the genocide of Muslims being given by Hindu religious leaders and leading ministers, rubble is being actively established as the spatial alternative of majoritarian will. These are not singular episodes of violence, nor are they aberrations, this is the idea of India that has been etched upon us as an infernal index.

Precipitating the community’s political erasure, the built environment is where this violence is simultaneously performed and obfuscated. In fact, bulldozers have not just stolen from the landscape, they have also allowed two distinct typologies to gradually emerge in space, with iron gates being installed in multiple localities to further cement the codes of segregation and with rows of saffron flags fastened outside Hindu households and businesses to secure protection in anticipation of future violence.

The sedimentation of debris, of broken streets and fractured memories, neighborhood after neighborhood, is the precise architecture of ruin, where rubble is not some vague state of disorder, rather a carefully choreographed architectural construction – as Léopold Lambert argues in his 2016 book La Politique du Bulldozer – that assembles the spatial order of the Hindu Rashtra. The spatiality of Hindu supremacist ideology predates the formation of the Indian nation-state and is saturated as its foundational violence that continued to manipulate and reorganize cities over the decades, where the Muslim population has been cast as the perpetual “internal enemy” and their repeated criminalization has been concurrent with their ghettoization. The British Raj and the years immediately following Partition intensified attitudes of suspicion and fear against Muslims of India, eventually taking the shape of endocolonialism. If in the late 1940s, the segregation of Muslims was justified into “Muslim Zones” for their protection and for maintaining communal harmony, the 1970s witnessed urban beautification drives as a rationale to storm the bulldozers through the narrow overcrowded lanes of Turkman Gate in Old Delhi, resulting in a massacre and leaving hundreds of thousands of Muslims displaced, all by forces claiming to preserve the “secular ideals” of the country. The cartographic anxieties that shaped the Indian state chiefly condense in the figure of Bharat Mata, where the divine and the anatomical converge into the incoherence of a map. Consequently, Muslim identity, particularly Muslim masculinities and their social reproduction through the space of a home or a mosque, was viewed as an existential blemish threatening to violate the sanctity and purity of Mother India. In fact, it is these anxieties that legitimized much of these tactics of spatial domination to be practiced and perfected in Indian-Occupied Kashmir from the early 1950s onwards.

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In April 2022, the Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Adesh Gupta sent a letter demanding to bulldoze “illegal encroachments” in Jahangirpuri and the North Delhi Municipal Corporation demolished homes, shops, and pushcarts belonging to Muslims. Despite an order from the Supreme Court of India to halt the demolitions an hour after they started, the bulldozing continued and local men were harassed, arrested, and tortured by the police. Among the worst impacted were landless caste-oppressed Muslims and Bengali-speaking Muslims migrating from faraway villages, who had built temporary shelters and informal settlements. They were called “foreigners” and “infiltrators,” suspected of being Bangladeshi or Rohingya Muslims.

“Unauthorized constructions” and “ugly encroachments” rehearse in spatial vocabularies the violence that can be justified against those who are considered “illegal” and “unworthy” on their own land, inside their own homes.

The retributive strength and popularity of “bulldozer justice” stems from the belief that some bodies need to be constantly sacrificed in order for the society to maintain its “law and order.”

Thousands of home demolitions across Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Rajasthan, among other states, have followed a pattern of attacks by Hindu supremacist mobs, followed by the police identifying local Muslims as the perpetrators of violence, and shortly after, the municipal authorities declaring their homes to be “illegal” and sending their bulldozers to demolish them in order to “teach the rioters a lesson.” All within less than 24 hours. Seldom do these cases reach the courtrooms, and if they do, the lack of adequate judicial mechanisms and a whirlpool of bureaucratic nightmares lead to the hearings being adjourned, while demolitions continue. In some of these cases, the state counsel presents the argument that the municipal authorities have been acting in accordance with the local laws, despite all evidence pointing to the fact that these demolitions are targeted and a tactic of organized vengeance against the local Muslim community. The courts’ refusal to address this as a state policy, to pass any interim orders or to offer sufficient means of relief, resettlement, and rehabilitation to those impacted by evictions and demolitions has meant that these punitive demolitions have been accompanied and encouraged by an equally punitive jurisprudence. Often, the police are found assisting the mobs or acting as passive bystanders when these neighborhoods are attacked, and the municipal authorities are found sending backdated notices to the residents about the impending demolition. The hollowness of these legal fictions becomes plain with the Janus-faced character of the state, where on one hand it maintains the veneer of legality by claiming that these demolitions follow “due process,” and on the other, ministers and government officials openly boast about running a “cleanliness campaign” against the “rioters,” sometimes even being rewarded or promoted for such acts of collective punishment. Assaulted with impunity, Muslim lifeworlds remain suspended along multiple grades of legal and permissible violence, with the courtrooms, the police, and the local administration not being the antidote, rather an extension of the mob.

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Routines of spatial violence have also been normalized by reproducing bulldozers as popular culture artifacts.

It runs banal like a catalog: a retired soldier gifted his daughter a bulldozer on her wedding day; bulldozer water guns and bulldozer crackers flood the markets during major Hindu festivals; the annual India Day diasporic parade in New Jersey flaunted bulldozers; a groom arrived for his wedding ceremonies seated on a bulldozer blade; bulldozer toys and bulldozer chips are sold in the streets; bulldozer-themed headgear was widely distributed among children to celebrate electoral victories; bulldozer t-shirts became the latest fashion fad for a section of youth; bulldozer memes and games dominate the social media streams. The same bulldozer that decimates homes has now become a household reference. “Kisi ko na chhorhenge, mitti mein mila ke sabki akad baba todenge,” (“Nobody will be spared, [Bulldozer] Baba will break their spirit by razing them to dust”) declares one song with 14.8 million views on YouTube. There are scores of other songs dedicated to the might of the bulldozer, often set to techno and pop aesthetics, which are blared during a series of mob attacks, Hindu religious processions, or sometimes, even while demolitions are taking place. Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath has earned the epithet of Bulldozer Baba (Daddy Bulldozer), while the former Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh Shivraj Singh Chouhan gained popularity as Bulldozer Mama (Uncle Bulldozer). Earlier, if amassing electoral power used to be dependent on massacres and mob lynchings, now these demolitions serve as effective tools to consolidate majoritarian vote banks. Even celebrated literary figures, young writers, and translators in the country have not been able to resist this weapon’s charm by accepting awards from the JCB Literature Foundation.

In being compared to the weapons of Hindu gods, dhanush and sudarshan chakra, by far-right leader Sakshi Maharaj, the bulldozer reveals its power to command awe and terror, particularly among the masses who regularly consume it via livestreamed, televised, and spectacularized ruinations. It often becomes difficult to assess whether the intensity of bulldozer violence is producing such spectacles or the appeal of these spectacles is producing more bulldozer violence. This has also led to an increase in the collective demand for more such violence because the bulldozer is now viewed as a commodity of leisure, adding both meaning and revelry to the event of demolition. In July 2023, Ashraf Hussain Mansoori’s three-story home in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, was first labeled as a “dangerous building” by the district administration in a backdated eviction notice and within an hour, bulldozers arrived, accompanied by drummers and an elaborate music system.

Atrocity image remains one of the most enduring instruments that transmits and translates rubble onto our screens and into our imaginations. Photographs and videos of destroyed homes and their helpless, terrified inhabitants are used by the majoritarian forces to intensify their control and normalize the hierarchies of subjugation. Moreover, generative AI and deepfakes are deployed to distort the narratives concerning this violence as well as to enhance the pleasure drawn from looking at these destructions. This gaze of the voyeur is how the majoritarian body constructs itself inside the seduction of the bulldozer.

Such fetishization also reveals the collective unconscious administering of the majoritarian psychosocial identity, wherein resentful nationalism is synthesized in the figure of the bulldozer by simultaneously promising to restore a glorious Hindu past and ushering in an age of progress and prosperity by eliminating the threatening and unwanted other. Fascism in India has compounded over the years to maintain and expand the traditional structures of caste dominance, which have largely remained unchanged despite the Independence, which preceded and have outlasted the British colonial rule. The Indian Independence Movement did not abolish these monolithic hierarchies, only aggravated and modernized their practices of oppression against Dalits, Muslims, and Adivasis. Bulldozer can thus be read as a technology of sustaining this continuation. Caste anxieties are assuaged by social cohesion and the disciplining force of parivar (family) offered by the bulldozer, allowing it to mobilize both Hindu and nationalist mythologies that seek to execute demographic engineering and preserve the superiority of the sanatana dharma (eternal order). The bulldozer flattens any pretense of distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva.

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This annihilatory violence is neither adjacent nor collateral, rather central to the economy of brahmin supremacist ideology and its creation of value, as can be understood by discerning rubble as both an interface and an infrastructure of accumulation. In such necroeconomy, the minoritized body is generated as “consumed” or “spent,” with poorer life expectancy rates, unemployment, substandard sanitation facilities, lack of access to nutrition and healthcare, irregular or zero access to water and electricity, and the threat of losing reproductive autonomy. As an affective weapon, rubble is not only used as a tool for population management, but also to modulate the histories of the bodies produced by its violence. It is often asserted that debris is simply the waste that mass violence leaves behind, disregarding that such organized violence is, in fact, an accelerated process of generating rubble and further calculating the hierarchy of humanity that predetermines certain communities for premature deaths, to be harnessed as capital for the majoritarian lifeworld. For the majoritarian “consumers” of this debris, ruination thus turns into an investment, far exceeding the realms of the built environment, allowing them to command control over both human and more-than-human domains. Bulldozers become machines that cleanse the landscape of those who are considered a spatial burden, a demographic threat, thereby securing the social production of more efficacious genocidal technologies. The accumulation of rubble is not mere static outcome of spatial violence, rather it is a deliberate sedimentation in landscape whose elasticity is the catalyst of several political processes, modifying and bending the territories, temporalities, and sovereignties where it takes shape.

Debris also emerges as a bordering practice that reinforces segregation and codes of spatial dominance, pushing the minoritized bodies to be dispossessed and displaced from their land. Mass violence thus becomes necessary and inevitable for the majoritarian forces to generate more debris, accumulate wider spatial control, and sustain the material conditions for the reproduction of their sociopolitical control.

Bulldozers, together with other forms of spatial attacks, reconfigure space in order to reshape identities, thereby calibrating a protracted loss of political rights and escalating the social death of the Muslim community.

It is also crucial to note that the language of rubble is not just the language of violence, but also the language of majoritarian “innocence.” Bulldozers are deployed to generate specific forms of spatialities, where bodies that are marked as “impure” are removed from public sight by mobilizing vocabularies of “encroachments” and “illegal constructions” to hem in the affects of disgust, fear, hatred, anger, and suspicion they evoke. Thus informed by caste logics, bulldozers become tools to disguise spatial violence as a purification ritual. They address the apprehensions of the oppressor-caste Hindus against Dalit, Muslim, and migrant working class bodies that must be produced, regulated, concealed, and punished in space, locked away from sight, sealed in zones of oblivion, without “contaminating” the space marked for them. Beautification and development are used as excuses for projects that are inherently aimed at enhancing the capital, safety, and comfort of the majoritarian interests. In fact, beauty as violence is made further evident in the regular use of green curtains and tin sheets to conceal acts of spaciocide, as was the case during mass slum demolitions in preparation for the G20 Summit in 2023 and the Commonwealth Games in 2010.

As these attacks become symbols of conquest, spatial reconfiguration across the country has been pushing Muslims not only at the periphery of cities, but also at the margin of citizenship. These bordering practices, consolidated most recently in the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 and the National Register of Citizens, underscore the colonial continuities that shape access to and claims over space, especially with a corresponding deployment of terms such as “foreigners,” “illegal immigrants,” and “infiltrators” against Muslims. Not only has it made these bodies unfit to reside within the normative state frameworks, but the debilitating psychological injuries that follow also make it difficult to reside inside and with their own selves, dislodged from every register of intimacy and dignity.

In July 2024, amidst heavy rainfall, more than 8,000 Muslims in Assam’s Silbhanga village were displaced after the local authorities demolished their homes, citing their “illegal construction” on railway land. Many of these families of Bengali-speaking Muslims had migrated from other districts after having lost their homes and livelihoods to floods, making Silbhanga their new home for over four decades. While a madarsa and a mosque wall were torn down, the authorities left the Hindu temples untouched. Thousands of kilometers away, Jai Bhim Nagar, a Dalit basti in Mumbai (Maharashtra) was demolished in a joint operation by the municipal authorities, the police, and a private builder, leaving more than 3,500 people homeless. Protesting residents were met with violence, leaving them with serious injuries while they are compelled to live on footpaths. In both the cases, precarious lives were disrupted and displaced both by coercion and force. Enduring hunger and lack of clean drinking water, exposed to multiple ailments, pushed to adjust to extreme temperatures in the open or inside makeshift tents, forced to travel long distances to seek safety in hostile conditions, facing social exclusion and loss of jobs in their new environments, survivors are abandoned by all. Families and all associations of belonging and meaning are uprooted and thrust into an uncertain future.

The horror of this violence lies in all that cannot be measured, all that evades the meticulous labor of statistics charts. The margin beyond the margin. The violence that follows after the bulldozers leave. Each demolition impacts the Air Quality Index with the rise in the fine and coarse particulate matter, chiefly the concentration of PM2.5 and PM10, thereby pushing marginalized lifeworlds into greater precarity with more pronounced health risks. Clouds of dust and smoke that hang for hours in the skies, loud noises from bulldozers as well as celebrating mobs and crowds, aggravated dust and groundwater pollution, long periods of open dumping of rubble along river beds and low-lying areas, and more severely impacted civic amenities ranging from sewage lines to electricity cables all mean that ghettoization, as experienced on the body and in the streets, is further cemented.

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Spatial exclusion is accompanied by temporal expulsion, producing a people dislodged from their history and exiled from their future.

Perhaps suspending minoritized lifeworlds into a ceaseless state of disorientation is the precise goal of ruination, obscuring slow violence that predominantly disturbs the community’s access to and experience of time on an everyday basis. This violence is neither visible nor calculable; violence that is dangerous precisely because of its ability to camouflage itself as some form of “anomaly” or “disorder.” It alters their quotidian rhythms and hardens the majoritarian apparatus against them. Dreams become sites of corrosion and graveyards are set on fire, exceeding even the total control over life, spilling into control over death. Analogous to these temporalities of destruction is the ruling mythology of “national rebirth,” where Amrit Kaal (The Era of Elixir), Achche Din (Good Days), and Naya Bharat (New India) indicate a grand temporality that all citizens must endeavor and wait for. Parroted as decolonization, this collective time of bliss can only be achieved by extinguishing all temporal possibilities for Muslims and by impelling Dalits into further servitude.

In their crisscrossing networks of segregation and surveillance, their neighborhoods precipitate a sense of nausea, a sense of impairment and exhaustion, a persistent hum that this order cannot be escaped. The Muslim community is socially and judicially criminalized, where the number of detainees and prisoners are disproportionately higher than any other community, with inadequate access to legal aid, prisons extend beyond the walls and rob multiple generations of their time. This affective warfare, aimed at imposing a monoculture, further contorts all imagination of their future.

The social production of rubble is predicated on two forms of temporal maiming, one in the chase of imaginary pasts, and the other in the annihilation of the possibilities of survival. The paradigmatic demolition of Babri Masjid in December 1992 marked one of the first instances of weaponizing archeology in India, justifying the destruction of the 16th-century mosque with the claim of an older Hindu temple once being present on the site. This was followed by hundreds of other mosques, shrines, and heritage sites either being similarly demolished or desecrated across various states with the aim of erasing all forms of historical Muslim presence and replacing it with a mythologized golden Hindu past. Shahi Masjid in Allahabad was demolished as part of a road-widening project, Akhoondji mosque, estimated to be six centuries old, was bulldozed citing an illegal encroachment, and Madrasa Aziza, the oldest library in Bihar Sharif, was set on fire, burning down more than 4,5000 rare books. Such destruction is crucial for the simultaneous construction of the aura of Akhand Bharat, a “unified Greater India,” which aims to mark its territorial expansion into neighboring countries by primarily advancing its control over domestic space. These acts are an attempt to obliterate a shared past as well as to rescript symbols and artifacts of cultural heritage into narratives of Hindu triumphalism.

Recently, thousands of Muslims of Akbar Nagar, Uttar Pradesh were evicted because their residential area along the banks of the Kukrail river in Lucknow was termed a green belt and eventually two million saplings were planted over their demolished homes to establish Saumitra forest. In a similar vein, thousands of migrant and indigenous peoples were displaced from the wildlife parks in Assam by weaponizing ecology and deploying militarized forest conservation with the use of bulldozers – and elephants. Tactics of control in the built environment extend to the projects of privatizing and exploiting nature and are portrayed as an attempt at preserving ecological balance, while completely disregarding acute environmental violence that results from such repeated spatial injuries, and once again decimating the future of the most vulnerable communities.

Against this architecture of ruin, the minoritized lifeworlds constellate their architectures of refusal, be it the “Sabki Library” for the displaced children and youth of Jai Bhim Nagar or the chain of young girls and women locking their hands in prayers and protest against being evicted in Haldwani. Space mobilizes absence and turns it into a site of spectral presence of all that has been lost. In these refusals, temporalities of elsewhereness and phantom geographies come alive, becoming sites of mourning as well as nourishment. When spatial infrastructures traditionally used for the social and cultural continuity of the community are destroyed, these sites redirect the bodies towards intimacy, imagination, and fight against the annihilatory forces of enclosure and ruination. More than some sequence of radical actions, they constitute a collective practice of dwelling and staying put in the rhythm of ordinary daily routines, thereby practicing an alternative home-making.

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What happens to the rubble that was once somebody’s home? Is it also dislocated similarly, thrown from one place to another, discarded along battered roadsides or elsewhere, forced into an afterlife at the construction site of a new building? If it is in the air that surrounds us, are we all breathing broken homes? ■