Harsh Mander: The injustice of the Supreme Court’s silence on ideological basis of demolitions

The decade-long leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been marked by a battery of mortal assaults on India’s constitutional edifice. These have cumulatively corroded and ultimately ravaged India’s secular democracy. Yet even amid this blitz of incursions, one that has stood out is the extrajudicial deployment of the bulldozer to target, intimidate and punish India’s Muslim citizens. This is a significant additive to the armoury of the ideological project of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to reduce them to second-class citizens.

From 2020, led by the example of Adityanath, the saffron-clad chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the bulldozer swiftly emerged as a wildly popular mascot of the BJP in every election campaign. BJP leaders holding high constitutional offices gloated in election rallies about its use to crush the rights and spirit of India’s largest religious minority. That what they termed “bulldozer justice” brazenly violated constitutional guarantees and the rule of law did not restrain them. On the contrary, they wore this defiant lawlessness as a badge of honour and an exemplar of their brand of masculinist, strongman Hindutva governance.

What is instructive is that even as “bulldozer justice” spread (like a pandemic or a blessing, depending on one’s moral...

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