New Delhi: The normalisation of various state governments’ drive to demolish homes of Indian Muslims and low-income groups came under the scanner in the latest Human Rights Watch report released on Thursday, January 12. The US-based global human rights observer in its annual report detailing human rights abuses and concerns in around 100 countries took notice of how different provincial governments of India in 2022 increasingly used home demolitions against low-income groups, especially Muslims, as a measure of extra-judicial punishment.
Although human rights defenders have consistently criticised the practice as administrative highhandedness to silence dissenters and protesters, the state governments have justified its demolition drive as an effective deterrent for those who allegedly participated in activities that the government perceived as a law and order concern. As recently as January 2023, the chief minister of India’s most-populous state Uttar Pradesh Adityanath, also popularly called ‘Bulldozer Baba’, justified the use of such a demolition drive as a probable “sign of peace”.
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With the HRW reporting the practice in its 2022 annual report – a 712-page document in its 33rd edition – it is perhaps for the first time that a global human rights body has expressed concern over the government’s use of a demolition drive against vulnerable groups. The HRW added that home demolitions are increasingly being used against Indian Muslims in India, by state governments that are led by the Bharatiya Janata Party driven by a Hindu majoritarian ideology.
The report noted multiple such incidents in 2022 which appeared to be cases of state governments targeting the Muslim community while carrying out punitive home demolitions.
“In April, authorities in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Delhi summarily demolished property mostly owned by Muslims in response to communal clashes. Although they tried to justify the demolitions by claiming the structures were illegal, the destruction appeared intended to be collective punishment for Muslims,” the HRW report said.
It went on to quote the BJP home minister in Madhya Pradesh who had threatened publicly that the houses of those who were involved in “stone pelting” will be “turned into rubble”. The BJP home minister Narottam Mishra carried out demolitions of the homes of three Muslim men alleged to have participated in inter-communal violence but spared similarly accused persons from the Hindu community.
Representative image. A bulldozer being used to demolish illegal structures during a joint anti-encroachment drive by NDMC, PWD, local bodies and the police, in the violence-hit Jahangirpuri area, in New Delhi, Wednesday, April 20, 2022. Photo: PTI
“In June, a BJP politician’s remarks against the Prophet Mohammed led to widespread protests by Muslims across the country. Police in Jharkhand allegedly used excessive force against protesters, killing two people, while authorities in Uttar Pradesh illegally demolished homes of Muslims suspected of being “key conspirators” behind protest violence,” the HRW said.
Also read: UP: Properties Linked to Accused Who Took Part in Protests Over Anti-Islam Remarks Demolished
In all such actions, the HRW notes, the state governments did not have any “legal authorisation”. “The authorities in several BJP-ruled states demolished Muslim homes and properties without legal authorisation or due process as summary punishment for protests or alleged crimes,” the HRW said.
The HRW added that the United Nations special rapporteurs in June 2022 wrote to the BJP-led Union government “raising serious concerns over the arbitrary home demolitions against Muslim communities and other low-income groups for alleged participation in inter-communal violence.
“They (special rapporteurs) said that “authorities reportedly failed to investigate these incidents, including incitement to violence and acts of intimidation that contributed to the outbreak of the violence,” the report said.
In what matched the intensity of their previous reports, the HRW in its latest report singled out India for trying to “mimic” China in violating global human rights’ standards, and especially detailed the increasing use of a majoritarian offensive by the ruling BJP against minorities.
“…Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has mimicked many of the same abuses that have enabled Chinese state repression — systematic discrimination against religious minorities, stifling of peaceful dissent, and use of technology to suppress free expression — to tighten its grip on power.”
‘Active complicity of state institutions to advance authoritarian impulses’
The HRW also hit out at the majoritarian biases in the functioning of state institutions that are supposed to enforce human rights.
“The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government continued its systematic discrimination and stigmatisation of religious and other minorities, particularly Muslims. BJP supporters increasingly committed violent attacks against targeted groups. The government’s Hindu majoritarian ideology was reflected in bias in institutions, including the justice system and constitutional authorities like the National Human Rights Commission,” the report said.
In detailed documentation of events in 2022, the HRW observed that the active complicity of state institutions in advancing the authoritarian impulses of the BJP-led Indian government was primarily responsible for large-scale human rights violations in India.
“Authorities intensified efforts to silence civil society activists and independent journalists by using politically motivated criminal charges, including terrorism, to jail those exposing or criticizing government abuses. The government used foreign funding regulations and allegations of financial irregularities to harass rights groups, political opponents, and others,” the report said.
It added that state authorities also “misused” laws against prohibiting forced religious conversions to “to target Christians, especially from Dalit and Adivasi communities”.
Also read: The Escalating Attacks on Christians and a Protest That Didn’t Happen
It also specially mentioned the release of 11 Hindu convicts for the gang rape of Bilkis Bano and 14 members of her family in 2002 communal violence as a case “the government’s discriminatory stance toward minority communities even in cases of violence against women.”
In the Muslim-majority Union territory of Kashmir, the HRW notes that even after three years of diluting Article 370, “the government continued to restrict free expression, peaceful assembly, and other basic rights there”, arbitrarily invoked the J&K Public Safety Act and UAPA to detain journalists and activists. At the same time, the HRW also severely criticised militant attacks on minority Hindu and Sikh communities in the Kashmir valley over the last year.
Also read: A Battle Against Forgetting: Recording the Sordid Saga of Kashmir Since August 2019
Similarly, the HRW notes persisting incidents of torture and extra-judicial killings in India, and stated that the National Human Rights Commission registered “147 deaths in police custody, 1,882 deaths in judicial custody, and 119 alleged extrajudicial killings in the first nine months in 2022”. It hit out at the Border Security Force for frequently using “excessive force” along the Bangladesh border, even as it expressed concern over continuing immunity for the security forces protected by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act.
Representative image. Security forces in Kashmir. Photo: PTI/Files
“In March, the Indian government reduced the number of districts under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in some northeast states. However, it remained in effect in Jammu and Kashmir and 43 of 90 districts in four northeastern states, providing effective immunity from prosecution to security force personnel, even for serious human rights violations,” the report said.
The attack on freedom of expression remained HRW’s one of the biggest concerns. Accusations of financial irregularities and “politically-motivated” tax raids and prosecutions, restrictions on foreign funding of critical NGOs, activists and rights’ groups like Oxfam India, Bengaluru-based Independent and Public Spirited Media Foundation, Delhi-based think tank Centre for Policy Research, prominent human rights activist Teesta Setalvad, journalist Mohammed Zubair and Jharkhand-based Rupesh Kumar found special mention in the HRW report.
The report also raised concern over the alarming rate of violence against women and girls that it said continued to grow even in 2022.
Even as it reported on executive excesses in India, HRW saw a silver lining in some of the Supreme Court’s judgments in 2022 such as restricting the use of colonial-era Sedition law that the apex court found was “repeatedly” misused to “arrest critics of the government”, and the order extending abortion rights all women regardless of their marital status and sexual orientation. The HRW report also hailed the SC’s ban on the two-finger tests to protect survivors of sexual assault.
However, it expressed its reservation on the SC’s failure to reach a verdict on whether Muslim female students could wear Hijab in educational institutions in BJP-led Karnataka. The Karnataka High Court had upheld the state government’s order to ban hijab, or a headscarf, in educational institutions of the state early last year.
The HRW mentioned that during the Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council, member countries raised concerns about India, and “ made recommendations on a range of issues including the need to protect minority communities and vulnerable groups, tackle gender-based violence, uphold civil society freedoms, protect human rights defenders, and end torture in custody”.
Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, told The Hindu that it was extremely critical that the Indian authorities begin to act against BJP party members and supporters responsible for the abuses against minorities instead of “jailing critics and shutting down rights groups”.
The increasing violations, acting executive director of HRW Tirana Hassan said, has become so widespread that it was no longer possible for a small group of governments in the Global North to defend human rights. “The responsibility is on individual countries, big and small, to apply a human rights framework to their policies, and then work together to protect and promote human rights,” she said.