A mother and her young daughter burned to death in the hut that was their home last week. The officials who brought the bulldozer that tore it down say that the women died by suicide. Their family alleges that the hut was deliberately set on fire with them in it. In excellent reportage by India Today I saw the yellow mechanical arm of the bulldozer tearing into the mud and thatch hut just before it catches fire. What is beyond dispute is that Pramila Dixit, 46, and her daughter Neha, 22, did not manage to get out of their burning home. Pramila’s son, Shivam, says that the demolition squad set his family’s home on fire to drive them out and that he escaped unhurt but was unable to save his mother and sister. His father managed to get out with relatively minor burns.
The incident happened in a village called Madoli near Kanpur. The officials in charge of the demolition have been arrested and the family of the dead women has been offered compensation. But this tragedy has not made headlines because under Bulldozer Baba, Uttar Pradesh has become a place where the bulldozer has become dangerously ubiquitous. Yogi Adityanath first used it against protesters three years ago when people demonstrated in the streets against an amendment to the Citizenship Act that they thought discriminated against Muslims. As happens when there are street protests, public property was damaged. And from CCTV cameras blurry mug shots of some protesters were retrieved and put on posters in Lucknow. Those who could be identified had their homes demolished. Many protested that they were just bystanders. It made no difference. Yogi went on then to demolish the homes of men he said were known criminals.
After he won a second term, bulldozers began to be used routinely in states ruled by the BJP mostly against Muslims with the clear intent of intimidating them. I would like to put on record that this column has spoken out against bulldozer justice more than once and I have said more than once that when you demolish someone’s home you punish not one person but a whole family. In that home there are children’s schoolbooks, family pictures and memories that are irreplaceable. These demolitions are wrong. Period.
Last week, around the time that Pramila and Neha lost their lives, the demolition story became personal for me. My sister lives in Mehrauli in a charming, little flat that has a distant view of the top of the Qutub Minar. She and her husband bought it nearly twenty years ago after checking that it was legitimately built on land that was bought by a Sikh refugee family after Partition. My sister paid house tax annually. And so, when around a month ago demolition notices began appearing outside other buildings she did not worry because she knew their building was legally built.
When the bulldozers arrived last week, she panicked because she and her husband saw other people with legal documents standing in front of the demolition squads whose cries for help went unheard. Local Aam Aadmi Party politicians stood with the victims. They said the demolitions were happening against the wishes of the Delhi Government. Rumours began to spread in Mehrauli’s narrow, twisting alleys, its bazaars, and buildings. The most disturbing rumour was that the demolitions were happening at this point to build a ‘corridor’ for delegates to the forthcoming G20 summit. To enable them to reach the Qutub, the archeological park and other old monuments and temples without needing to go through this ancient, historical locality’s winding, crowded alleyways.
If there is the smallest truth in this rumour, it will hurt the government’s grandiose G20 festivities. Most countries in the G20 are democracies and if delegates discover that people lost their homes and livelihoods for them to spend a few hours in Mehrauli, they are not likely to approve. My sister and a group of other residents have gone to court with their problem and the court has demanded an explanation from the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). But this has come too late for those who lived in shanties in Mehrauli and made a meagre living out of their small shops. They now spend long, cold nights sitting amid the rubble of what used to be their homes.
The question that needs to be asked is whether these things should be happening at all in the ‘mother of democracy’? There have been many instances in the past when the government has lawfully taken possession of someone’s property when it came in the way of a new highway or some other public utility. It was hard on those who lost their homes, but compensation was given and a process of acquiring the land was followed so that hardship could be minimized. The bulldozer policy started by Bulldozer Baba is totally different. It is brute use of state power and brutal crushing of the rule of law.
It is the kind of brute use of power we saw twice before. Once when eighty percent of our currency was made invalid overnight. The second time in that first COVID lockdown when our poorest citizens were forced to walk hundreds of kilometres to their village homes because they became suddenly jobless and homeless, and all public transport was stopped. Brute state power is ugly and has no place in the ‘mother of democracy’.