In the northern Indian city of Haldwani, about 4,000 families faced homelessness in December after the High Court of the state, Uttarakhand, ordered their eviction from land claimed by the Indian Railways.
Most of the families are Muslim, and everything — homes, schools and mosques — was to be demolished.
The story rightly made international headlines, and eventually, the country’s Supreme Court put a hold on the eviction for now, arguing that authorities needed to come up with a resettlement and rehabilitation plan first. The bulldozer is central to this strategy.
Muslims are the target. And unlike in Haldwani, affected people and communities only rarely get even a temporary reprieve. Nowhere is this more evident than in the northeastern state of Assam, some 2,000km (1,242 miles) away from New Delhi, where the BJP has ruled since 2016.
Thousands of Muslim families have been forcibly evicted since 2021 from land they had been residing on for decades. Since 2016, police have shot at and killed protesters in at least two instances.
The campaign to render families homeless has picked up steam in recent weeks. On December 19, about 250 families were evicted in the Nagaon district of Assam.
A week later, 47 families’ homes were destroyed in Barpeta district. In the Lakhimpur district, hundreds of families were evicted in early January.
The Idea behind the inhuman and violent evictions is to keep Muslims landless and impoverished: Muslims have a higher poverty rate and lower literacy rate than the national average.
Research has shown that Indian Muslims have lower upward mobility than people from even those Hindu castes and tribes that have traditionally been discriminated against.
