India’s bulldozer regime is evicting Muslims, killing justice | Human Rights

Within the northern Indian metropolis of Haldwani, about 4,000 households confronted homelessness in December after the Excessive Court docket of the state, Uttarakhand, ordered their eviction from land claimed by the Indian Railways.

A lot of the households are Muslim, and every little thing — houses, faculties and mosques — was to be demolished. The story rightly made worldwide headlines, and finally, the nation’s Supreme Court docket put a maintain on the eviction for now, arguing that authorities wanted to provide you with a resettlement and rehabilitation plan first.

But the incident in Haldwani, 296km (184 miles) from nationwide capital New Delhi, captures a broader sample of injustice masquerading as regulation and order that’s taking part in out throughout India beneath the majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Celebration (BJP), which guidelines federally and in most states.

The bulldozer is central to this technique. Muslims are the goal. And in contrast to in Haldwani, affected individuals and communities solely not often get even a short lived reprieve.

Nowhere is that this extra evident than within the northeastern state of Assam, some 2,000km (1,242 miles) away from New Delhi, the place the BJP has dominated since 2016. 1000’s of Muslim households have been forcibly evicted since 2021 from land they’d been residing on for many years. Since 2016, police have shot at and killed protesters in a minimum of two situations.

The marketing campaign to render households homeless has picked up steam in latest weeks. On December 19, about 250 households had been evicted within the Nagaon district of Assam. Every week later, 47 households’ houses had been destroyed in Barpeta district. Within the Lakhimpur district, a whole lot of households had been evicted in early January.

These numbers are simply the tip of the iceberg. There’s a way to the insanity. The Miya Muslim group — whose ancestors, many generations in the past, settled in Assam from East Bengal, then an integral a part of British India (and now Bangladesh) — is going through the brunt of the evictions and demolitions.

The group is commonly focused, particularly by the Hindu proper, as “unlawful immigrants” and the phrase “Miya” is ceaselessly used as a pejorative. Final yr, authorities arrested Miya Muslims who had arrange a museum devoted to the group’s cultural artefacts. Assam’s BJP Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma successfully accused museum organisers of cultural appropriation, arguing that the gadgets on show weren’t distinctive to the Miya Muslim group.

The thought behind the inhuman and violent evictions is to maintain Muslims landless and impoverished: Muslims have the next poverty price and decrease literacy price than the nationwide common. Analysis has proven that Indian Muslims have decrease upward mobility than individuals from even these Hindu castes and tribes which have historically been discriminated towards.

In Assam, landlessness is a persistent drawback amongst marginalised teams, accentuated by annual floods and the perennial drawback of riverbank erosions. Many weak communities decide on government-owned land as they give the impression of being to earn a residing by working amongst native communities and on farmland.

As a substitute of addressing this drawback of landlessness, the Assam authorities is singling out Miya Muslims from amongst these occupying state-owned land, solely due to their religion, and is evicting them.

Elsewhere, this epidemic of evictions is getting used to both collectively punish Muslims or assault activists from the group who’ve dared to lift their voices towards authorities injustices.

In New Delhi, houses of Muslims had been demolished — together with for some time after a Supreme Court docket order to halt the pressured eviction — final April, days after inter-religious rigidity within the neighbourhood. Within the state of Uttar Pradesh, authorities demolished the houses of Muslims who had protested towards controversial remarks by a BJP spokesperson towards Prophet Muhammad final July. The state of Madhya Pradesh — additionally dominated by the BJP — has used the identical tactic, too.

These are assaults on the rights of residents. The federal government equipment, with gigantic police forces in riot gear, excavators and in some circumstances even elephants, perform the evictions. Most often, the demolitions have been carried out with none warning or authorized notices.

At one in every of Assam’s eviction websites, individuals who had their houses demolished arrange tarpaulin tents by the roadside. Authorities officers got here and eliminated even that non permanent shelter. The place are they purported to go now? I had no reply. Once I requested these rendered homeless, they didn’t, both.

That is barbaric. That is merciless. It isn’t simply houses that these individuals are dropping. Typically, their standing crops are destroyed, their bushes felled. Even bogs are changed into rubble. In lots of circumstances, the victims are poor, and are pressured to sleep within the open in harsh climate — usually hungry, and with out entry to meals or clear water. Girls don’t have the privateness of a rest room.

Their plight and losses are principally invisible in mainstream information. The civil society representing minorities has no area within the media, and the civil society representing the bulk is silent. Maybe that’s why Abdul Khaleque, amongst these evicted in Lalung Gaon of Nagaon district stated to me: “Let the federal government shoot us; we don’t have anywhere to go.”

In fact, Miya Muslims, and marginalised communities in India extra broadly, aren’t unfamiliar with the violence unleashed on them by the state and by non-state actors. In Assam, Miya Muslims have lengthy had their citizenship questioned — they’re ceaselessly othered as encroachers who’re one way or the other, not Assamese.

Evictions are the newest weapon to focus on Muslims in Assam and throughout India. Whereas the Supreme Court docket intervened within the Haldwani case, it’s unclear whether or not others who’ve suffered will ever obtain justice.

And that, in the end, is the largest casualty of what the BJP and its governments are doing. Their bulldozers are demolishing the very idea of justice for Indian Muslims.

The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.