In the early hours of April 21, a fleet of bulldozers accompanied by hundreds of policemen descended on Jahangirpuri in northwest Delhi to demolish buildings, petty shops, and the entrance gate of a mosque. Soon after the demolitions started, the Supreme Court in an urgent hearing ordered that “status quo” be maintained until further orders, but the demolition continued for over an hour after the order was passed.
The demolition drive was initiated after the Delhi BJP chief Adesh Gupta wrote to North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) to demolish the “illegal constructions” of the rioters in Jahangirpuri. Communal violence had broken out in the area on April 16 when a Hanuman Jayanti Shobha Yatra, which did not have police permission, clashed with Muslims as it went alongside the mosque. This comes on the heels of other incidents, in Khargone in Madhya Pradesh and Khambhat in Gujarat, where processions during Ram Navami led to communal flare-ups which were followed by the state-directed demolition of homes of the alleged rioters.
The actions of state and local authorities to bulldoze shops and homes in riot-hit Muslim neighbourhoods citing “illegal encroachment” raises major legal concerns. At one level, such actions show a blatant disregard for the due process of law and established judicial precedents regarding evictions. At another level, it conveys the cynical use of brute state power for collective punishment undermining the basic tenets of criminal law.
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