How The Indian Executive Weaponised The Bulldozer For Political Projections !

 

BY R.K.MISRA

Governments are greedy. Whether it is power, pelf or public wealth.

Give them a land to helm and they seek the world to overwhelm.

 Turn the gaze yonder, and the most powerful come into view.

 Turn it nearer home and watch the executive straining every nerve and sinew!

 

How else would one have the Supreme Court into sharp focus for the second week going . ”Prayagraj demolitions inhuman, illegal, shock conscience, says SC, orders Rs.10 lakh for each”, screamed national headlines on April 2. And yet there seems no end in sight. On April 7, says the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, “There is a complete breakdown of rule of law in Uttar Pradesh”, after the Supreme Court comes across FIRs filed by the state police in civil cases.

At the receiving end of the Supreme Court’s wrath was the Yogi Adityanath government and the Prayagraj civic body. ‘The act of demolition was not only illegal but also violative of the most important fundamental-right to shelter”, ruled a Supreme Court bench of justice AS Oka and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan. The harshest possible words flowed from the highest court of the land. ”Unconstitutional, inhuman, this shocks our conscience, high-handed demolition, whither due process of law?”.  The anguish was writ large in the judgment, enough to make heads hang and hearts hurt. Did it?

The homes of an advocate, a professor and three others including two women, were razed by authorities on March 7, 2021 following a mistaken identification that these stood on land that belonged to late gangster-politician Atiq Ahmed. The houses had been demolished at a day’s notice, affixed on the walls of the properties. ”This affixing business must stop”, said the court, terming the demolition, a high handed act, while ordering compensation of Rs ten lakhs to each of the affected house owner. The appellants had approached the Supreme Court after the Allahabad High Court had rejected their petition challenging the UP government’s decision. The apex court judgment came over four years later.

For a country which took decades to switch from manual digging to use of machines for such a basic task, bulldozers emerged as symbols of a nation on the move. To monk-politician Adityanath, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh goes the privilege of weaponising this machine to deliver staccato bursts of instant, retributive justice. Bulldozing is now a brute form with law as bait and it has earned him the sobriquet of ‘bulldozer baba’. The 2022 Vidhan Sabha elections in Gujarat were marked by the deployment of both by the BJP in election campaigning. On April 21, 2024 Adityanath was given a unique guard of honour by a horde of bulldozers when he went to Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh for election campaigning.

The weaponisation of the bulldozer and its use for instant political justice may have begun from Uttar Pradesh but has proliferated rapidly into a nationwide phenomenon, more so in the BJP ruled states where vote cleaving is an accepted strategy.

Virtually addressing students of the Columbia Law School on April 4, Justice A.S.Oka of the Supreme Court said that after 75 years, there are still many instances of hate speeches.”In the court we come across cases where mostly these hate speeches are against the religious minorities or castes which are in minority, oppressed classes like scheduled castes”. He also expressed great concern at the hate speeches for political reasons.

Interestingly, it was on April 1, that Delhi’s law and justice minister ,Kapil Mishra found himself in the dock when a Delhi court directed registration of an FIR on a complaint alleging he had a role in the 2020 riots in North east Delhi. It is a work in progress and there is lots more to follow.

The bulldozer brand of justice being propagated by the political class with colluding enthusiasts from the country’s corroded steel frame as willing handmaidens may be advantageous in the short run but is causing grievous harm in the long one. The politician in power is increasingly getting accustomed to playing ..I am the law, judge, jury and executioner. ”As things stand, one person holds all the power to determine guilt, deliver verdict and carry out a punishment, the outcome is anybody’s guess”, points out a retired civil servant. He should know better for the list of those who were doing the bidding of their political masters In Gujarat and ended up behind bars after they declined to go along is fairly long.

Take another example, this time from Uttarakhand where a deliberately messed up investigation including ‘planting evidence’ in a rape-cum-murder case. The  accused spend a decade hanging by a slender thread  before the sentence was quashed and he was acquitted from death row by the Supreme Court.

Notwithstanding the Apex Court’s stern stand, the Gujarat Police is hard at work preparing a list of anti-socials and by official admission had come up with a list of 7,612 names. The action came on the orders of the state DGP, Vikas Sahay . The list includes 3,264 bootleggers,516 booked for gambling,948 involved in property related crimes,179 in illegal mining and 545 people booked for assorted crimes.

The official statement from the state police that these people have been placed under watch and their illegal constructions or encroachments as well as illegal electricity connections are under scrutiny. Besides 59 of them have been booked under prevention of Anti-social Activities Act (PASA), 724 placed under preventive detention and 12 illegal constructions demolished.

Information co-related from major cities of the state point to the fact that demolition of ‘illegal’ establishments has already begun as a follow-up of the drive undertaken under orders of the DGP dated March 15. The cops are coordinating with civic bodies to discipline anti-socials through demolitions or any other way to instill the fear of the law, it is said. 

Nevertheless, a look inside their own clothing would do the cops a world of good. We all live in glass houses and no one has clean windows!

 

This syndicated news column was published in the Indian newspapers Orissapost and

Lokmat Times editions dated April 8,2025  . Their links are given below:-

https://odishapostepaper.com/edition/5279/orissapost/page/9

https://epaper.lokmat.com/articlepage.php?articleid=LOKTIME_NPLT_20250408_6_3

https://mediamap.co.in/blog/SupremeCourtGreatlyUpsetWithYogiGovtCallsDemolitionsUnconstitutionalInhuman

 

.