Constructing Muslim Absence: “Bulldozer Justice” in India

Faisal Meer 4 — In May 2023, under heavy police and paramilitary deployment, the Archaeological Survey of India, the South East Delhi district administration, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, and the Delhi Development Authority demolished more than a thousand homes in Tughlakabad, Delhi. The residents mostly worked as domestic workers, rag pickers, and were employed in other menial jobs; after the demolition, most of the families, predominantly Muslim, have been displaced and remain without any hope for compensation. / Photo by Meer Faisal.

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.