Four days after the April 22 terrorist attack in India-administered Kashmir’s Pahalgam that killed 26 people, police vehicles and earth-moving machinery rolled into a Muslim-majority slum colony in the Chandola Lake area of Ahmedabad, over 1,500 km away.

Officials were ferreting out illegal immigrants with suspected terror links, they said. 

On April 29, the municipality in this city, in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state Gujarat, launched its largest-ever slum demolition drive, razing the Muslim-dominated Bangali Vaas slum, one of the slum clusters around the water body. Posting an aerial video of the operation, the Gujarat police’s official X handle called it a ‘cleanliness campaign’.   

This time, officials simply said the historic Chandola Lake had shrunk because of decades of encroachment. 

In June, in phase two of the demolition, authorities razed 8,500 structures in a single day. Tens of thousands were suddenly homeless as 50 excavator machines, 3,000 policemen and others left the now-flattened slum sprawl.    

The same week, a statewide crackdown had led to the detention of nearly 6,500 people, mostly Muslims, citing security concerns. Police said about 450 of them were found to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh; the others continued to face interrogations. 

Demolition drives across cities

The Chandola Lake story is not an isolated incident. It’s the latest in a rapidly spreading rash of demolition drives, ostensibly meant to clear ‘illegal’ or ‘unauthorised’ settlements, but with the Muslim poor appearing to be disproportionately targeted.

In the summer of 2022, opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party and Asaduddin Owaisi of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, attacked the government for the use of bulldozers to raze homes of those accused in communal violence-hit Delhi and Madhya Pradesh. 

In both states, the demolition of alleged unauthorised structures targeted mostly poor Muslims, such as those in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri.

In the state of Haryana’s Nuh district, following communal clashes in 2023, about 750 structures belonging to alleged rioters were razed in four days. 

Halting the demolition drive, the Punjab and Haryana high court asked if the action was an “exercise of ethnic cleansing” by the state. The majority of the razed structures belonged to Muslims.

Nuh, among the most under-developed districts in India, has a 79 percent Muslim population. 

Muslims who speak up have been especially targeted. 

In June 2022, in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), ruled by the Hindu-nationalist BJP and with Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath as chief minister, the house of a Muslim political activist and businessman was demolished after only a day’s notice to vacate. 

The activist had been arrested as a conspirator in a communal conflagration, though he would later be released on bail in multiple cases with judges citing poor evidence. 

In Lucknow, in UP, about 1,800 homes in a locality named Akbar Nagar, most of them occupied by poor Muslim families, were demolished in 2024 to make way for a riverfront plaza and eco-tourism hub. 

A government spokesperson said among the residents were Bangladeshi “infiltrators” and Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim group that has fled religious persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. 

Locals said they’d lived there for over five decades.

In 2023, 135 homes belonging to Muslim families in Mathura were demolished as ‘encroachments’, even as nearby Hindu homes remained untouched. 

Across several BJP-ruled states, authorities have led demolition drives that increasingly resemble tools of collective punishment rather than urban planning. 

Adityanath, the original ‘Bulldozer Baba’ given the moniker for ruthless action against unauthorised constructions, was joined in 2022 by Madhya Pradesh’s then chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who also came to be called ‘Bulldozer Mama’ (mama, meaning uncle in Hindi).

Other demolition drives have also affected the most marginalised Indians. 

On June 11 and 12, 350 tenements in a five-acre slum in south Delhi called Bhumiheen Camp (literally translated as ‘camp for the landless’) were demolished when the city was in the grip of a heatwave. 

As the temperature soared to 45 degrees celsius, demolition teams left hundreds homeless. 

India’s capital city also witnessed large-scale evictions in the run-up to the G-20 summit in 2023, where the host country’s slogan was, ironically, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, Sanskrit for ‘the world is a single family’.

By one estimate, in 2022 and 2023 alone, 153,820 informal homes were demolished and 738,438 people evicted across India. A February 2024 report by Amnesty International found Muslim-concentrated localities were often chosen for demolitions. 

This was particularly evident in cases of ‘punitive evictions’, where properties of those accused of crimes were demolished without following the due process of law.

Lawful process bypassed 

In April 2022, Narottam Mishra, then home minister of Madhya Pradesh, told news crews that the homes of stone-pelters would be razed “to a pile of stones”, suggesting that entire neighbourhoods would face collective punitive action, without due process of law.

This troubling pattern of collective punishment, rather than target only individuals accused of a crime, has caused entire neighbourhoods, often Muslim-majority, to face State retribution, casting entire populations of a locality as complicit and violating any number of core constitutional principles.

In November 2024, hearing a bunch of petitions opposing ‘bulldozer justice’, the Supreme Court established  guidelines regarding due process in demolition actions. 

The court’s observations made it clear that the executive’s use of property demolition as a substitute for criminal prosecution entirely violated principles of natural justice. 

One of the pleas in that case was filed by a 60-year-old Muslim autorickshaw driver in Udaipur, in the western Indian state of Rajasthan whose home, purchased with a lifetime of savings, was demolished after his tenant’s minor son, also a Muslim, stabbed a Hindu cassmate. 

The case prompted communal clashes and Hindu outfits soon demanded ‘bulldozer action’. Soon, the structure was declared an encroachment on forest land and demolished shortly thereafter. 

Far from being enforcement of land-related laws, the demolition had been aimed at intimidation, erasure and assertion of majoritarian dominance. 

Thrusting the poor deeper into tragedy

Four decades ago, in a landmark case when journalists and civil society groups petitioned courts against forced evictions of Mumbai’s slum and pavement dwellers, the Supreme Court concluded that the right to life, a fundamental right conferred by Article 21 of the Constitution, includes the right to livelihood, and that evicting slum-dwellers without due process deprives them of their livelihood. 

Since then, Indian courts have on multiple occasions iterated that forced evictions without due process are violative of the Constitution. 

On the ground, however, residents of informal housing facing anti-encroachment drives have complained of formal notice not being served, or of notice being served without reasonable time to be heard or vacate, and belongings ranging from legal documents to household goods have been destroyed by the excavator machines.   

In Khargone (Madhya Pradesh), Jahangirpuri (Delhi) and several other sites of large-scale demolitions, sources of livelihoods – including shops and carts – were reported to have been damaged. 

The Amnesty report found that between April and June 2022,  authorities in five states including Assam, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi—four of them at the time ruled by the BJP—conducted demolitions as punitive action after communal violence or protests against the government. It found at least 617 people, including men, women, children and older persons, rendered homeless and/or deprived of  livelihoods. 

Whether for the Chandola Lake area or Lucknow’s Kukrail riverfront project,nobody can realistically believe that these demolitions yield slum-free cities. Not only can the poor not be wished away, India’s metropolises thrive on the labour these communities provide. The demolitions serve only to bulldoze them out of sight. 

Those evicted suffer the trauma and indignity of physical displacement, along with the unravelling of community ties, loss of livelihoods, and disrupted access to healthcare, education and other basic services. 

During the ordeal to identify a new shelter, the desperately poor and vulnerable are often the first to be thrust deeper into crisis.