Restructuring life and work through bulldozer “justice” in urban India

Abstract

This article examines the intensification of demolition drives in urban India over the past decade. It situates forced evictions within the history of “development” induced displacement and the contemporary rise of Hindutva nationalism. The Indian development model has historically relied on large-scale displacement for infrastructural expansion, conservation projects, and urban redevelopment. Policies to produce a “world-class” city have increased the incidence of forced evictions, even as avenues for rehabilitation have diminished. In recent years, punitive demolitions—popularly termed “bulldozer justice”—have emerged as a key instrument of repression targeting Indian Muslims, particularly migrant workers. The recent coupling of punitive demolition with mass deportation has further deepened the crisis of housing precarity and internal displacement, while simultaneously resulting in statelessness and external displacement for Muslims. Forced evictions across the Global South have long accompanied urban beautification, mega-events, and capitalist redevelopment, and have also served as mechanisms of nationalist consolidation and rising fascism. India participates in both trajectories, offering an instructive example of how right-wing nationalism converges with capitalist development, worsening housing precarity for urban workers in the informal urban economy. Drawing on reports, policy documents, and case studies, this article demonstrates how demolition drives operate simultaneously as an economic strategy to capture land for private real-estate capital and as a punitive tool deployed against political dissent and the country’s Muslim population.

Over the last 10 years, the crisis of forced evictions, displacement, and demolition drives has become emblematic of Narendra Modi's Hindutva nationalist state. Since 2017, bulldozer drives have been openly promoted as a punitive mechanism against Muslimsin the name of “law and order.” Urban demolition drives carried out through public–private partnerships (henceforth PPPs), and land clearances for real estate development have intensified over the past decade. This article examines how demolition drives in Modi's India shape the urban landscape, including their impact on migrant workers and Muslims. Focusing on two motivations—urban “beautification” and punitive demolitions— it offers a concentrated summary of a wide range of existing reports and perspectives, to track the changing nature and rhetoric of “bulldozer justice” within the current political regime.

Forced evictions as a global phenomenon

The use of bulldozers to displace workers and minorities is not new to India, nor is it unique to the country. This politics of violent displacement has been a defining feature of the development model across the Global South. Slum clearances and urban “beautification” have been built into postcolonial national growth strategies, particularly in efforts to compete within global circuits of capital (Davis, 2006; Okwei et al., 2025). Urban “redevelopment” projects, in concert with private actors, have become synonymous with illegal, arbitrary, and forced evictions (Amakihe, 2017; Lawreniuk, 2021; Okwei et al., 2025; Paul, 2006; Potts, 2006).

Demolition drives have historically served a punitive purpose, sometimes cloaked in “developmental” rhetoric and at other times openly celebrating right-wing nationalism and settler colonialism, with “slum demolition (as) a well-established technique of political containment and social control” (Klopp, 2008: 296). As Potts (2006: 291) argues in the Zimbabwean case, massive demolition drives followed a dual developmentalist and punitive impulse across countries which “force[s] far too many people into ‘illegality’ and deem[s] them only too vulnerable to the actions of an authoritarian state under cover of ‘restoring order.’” Demolition-based displacement has also been characteristic of Israel's settler-colonial project (Green and Smith, 2016). ¹ The Israeli Occupying Forces (henceforth IOF) have continuously used the strategy of bulldozing Palestinian homes and displacing people to expand and create illegal settlements.

The global interconnectedness of demolition politics is also reflected in the value chains through which the chief instrument of demolition—the bulldozer—is produced and circulated. India's bulldozer drives reveal a wider participation in these chains that are formative of authoritarian violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. The British company JCB (J.C. Bamford Excavators Limited) is a prominent actor within the industrial-military network and holds contracts with the Indian Ministry of Defence and the U.S. Department of Defense (Economic Times, 2025). Israel also holds contracts with JCB, and the IOF regularly uses JCB bulldozers to destroy Palestinian homes in Gaza and the West Bank (Amnesty International, 2021). Right-wing nationalists in India have praised JCB for the role it has played in demolishing Muslim-majority localities. Given the widespread use of these bulldozers in India, JCB has long been associated with forced evictions and demolition drives. Over the last decade, it has become closely associated with punitive “bulldozer justice” in India, described by one article as “a symbol of Hindu nationalism, used by the BJP and its supporters to menace Muslims and signify victory over them” (Mander, 2026b).

Contemporary landscape of forced evictions

Forced evictions have been a constitutive factor in India's development trajectory after its independence in 1947. ² Early visions of national development emphasized high industrial growth to position India competitively within the global economy (De, 2014; Singh, 2020). Modernization efforts under India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, included dam construction, creating industrial enclaves, new transportation infrastructure, and producing “world-class” cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bengaluru. These projects led to mass displacement across India, with an estimated 60–65 million people displaced between 1947 and 2012 (Fernandes, 2007). In the last 5 years, there has been a striking 379% increase in evictions nationwide, due in significant part to targeted punitive demolitions of Muslim residences and slums alongside the ongoing project of “development” (Mander, 2026a).

Urban demolition drives have increased in frequency over the past decade, with a notable escalation since 2017. The Housing and Land Rights Network (henceforth HLRN) estimated that about 260,000 people were displaced in 2017 after the state demolished over 53,000 homes across the country (HLRN, 2018). Forty-seven percent of the demolished homes were in urban areas and were cleared for “beautification.” New construction projects and “development” schemes accounted for 30% of demolished homes across metropolitan and Tier 1, 2, 3, and 4 cities. ³ The majority of those evicted received little to no compensation or resettlement. Continuing forced evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic worsened housing precarity and health conditions for workers. Government authorities displaced around 257,700 people between March 2020 and July 2021, at an average eviction rate of 21 people per hour. Demolition rates have continued to rise, more than doubling from an average of 25 people per hour in 2022 to an estimated 58 people per hour in 2023 (HLRN, 2024). Demolition drives displaced an estimated 27,000 people in Delhi alone after the BJP's rise to power, and around 9000 were left without rehabilitation (Choudhary, 2025).

Why are we seeing such an increase in the pace and scale of bulldozer drives? Urban development through beautification campaigns and “modernizing” infrastructure remains a crucial factor. Policies aimed at creating “world-class” cities have resulted in massive demolition drives in urban slums. Such drives are a common characteristic across India's cities, with cleared areas becoming high-value sites for the construction of hotels, malls, shopping complexes, and projects designed to create business and investment-friendly centers through a PPP model. More often than not, demolition drives involve severe state violence, leaving residents homeless in extreme conditions of cold, heat, and rain. These drives pose serious physical and mental health risks, particularly for women and children, and have led to multiple deaths (Anand, 2023; Emmel and D'Souza, 1999; Raj, 2025; The Times of India, 2018; Telegraph India, 2025).

Since 2017, the bulldozer as a tool of state-dispensed “justice” has further increased these numbers and radically altered the political landscape of demolition drives—now legitimized not only in the name of urban development but also in the name of maintaining a strong, orderly state. Demolition drives targeting Muslims have worsened the housing and economic crisis caused by forced evictions by sharpening their punitive dimension in unprecedented ways. The rhetoric of illegality—directed at migrant workers generally and more sharply at Muslim workers—has intensified anti-Muslim sentiment as a justification of demolitions, in turn normalizing directly punitive mass demolitions.

Hindutva nationalism and “bulldozer justice”

Punitive demolitions have become a category of their own within the longer, violent trajectory of India's development story. The pace and intensity of targeted demolition drives against Muslim populations have increased alarmingly over the last decade. The term “bulldozer justice” began to gain currency in 2017, when Yogi Adityanath became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (henceforth UP). In UP, punitive demolitions constitute a significant component of state violence against Muslim political dissidents, so-called “mafia” leaders, and activists (Hindustan Times, 2025; Raj, 2025). Using the rhetoric of rescuing UP from lawlessness, the government continues to deploy “bulldozer justice” as a tool against Muslims (Civicus, 2022).

During the 2022 state elections in UP, Adityanath used the bulldozer as a central symbol in his reelection campaign, emphasizing the success of his first term as chief minister on the basis of creating a strong state through this machinery. Hindutva nationalist supporters hail Adityanath with the moniker “bulldozer baba” and praise him for leading the charge on demolition drives (Narayan, 2025). ⁴ With this political symbolism, the bulldozer has become a defining image of Adityanath's rule in UP, consolidated with its conscious and widespread use in the 2022 electoral campaign (Pandey, 2022). Across other states, the BJP's electoral campaigns, political rallies, songs, poems, and advertisements have capitalized on the image of the bulldozer as a BJP success story for strong governance. In one example from UP, “a celebratory rally of JCB bulldozer machines was carried out in Gorakhpur town.” During demolitions in Delhi in April 2022, GVL Narasimha, a BJP spokesperson, equated JCB with “Jihadi Control Board” (Frankental, 2024).

Hindutva campaigns have formed a clear association between the bulldozer, anti-Muslim sentiment, and successful governance, underscored by urban development as an integral part of constructing safe, clean, and modern cities. Mass demolition drives are justified by BJP leaders on religious and economic lines by advocating for a modern and developed state and insisting that the displaced Muslims are dangerous “illegal” immigrants. Taken holistically, the combined punitive and developmental demolition drives have targeted the most marginalized populations. Thousands of Muslims have been displaced from their homes in the aftermath of communal violence and in order to construct new urban infrastructure, highways, and road corridors. ⁵ Right-wing nationalist parties justify forced evictions and “bulldozer justice” targeting Muslims as part of an urban development strategy aimed at improving cities (Behal, 2025).

This blueprint of sudden demolition drives as a punitive system has become increasingly prominent across BJP-ruled states in India, with some of the worst violence occurring in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Mumbai, Delhi, and Assam (Amnesty International, 2024a). Amnesty International (2024b) records that at least 617 people had their homes and businesses demolished between April and June 2022 during heightened religious tensions and violence. Demolitions have become a means to double down on the violence against Muslims during riots. Bulldozer drives in the aftermath of riots, or after instances of protests against communal violence, discriminatory policies, and Islamophobic statements, reveal that demolition drives have become the state's de facto policy to counter dissent and to bolster sectarian violence. ⁶

In one notorious case, a Muslim activist in UP was arrested and slapped with multiple false charges in 2022 under the (manufactured) pretext of having organized protests against a BJP leader. His house was demolished while he was in custody. Despite multiple visits to the courts, he and his family have not received compensation (Tantray, 2024). Such attacks are a common form of targeting Muslims whose properties are demolished while they are falsely accused of crimes that have no association with their property holdings—a clear declaration of the state's absolute right to dispense “justice” at will.

Muslim communities have also been targeted for asserting their faith by advertising the slogan “I Love Muhammad” (Rizvi, 2025). Protesters against this ban on using the slogan have had their properties demolished on the pretext of being “unauthorized” structures, particularly in Gujarat and UP (Chaudhary, 2025). Security forces have beaten workers and used firearms, lathis, and tear gas while conducting demolitions. ⁷ These demolitions usually take place without due process, in violation of Indian and international legal statutes. While demolitions for “beautification” drives have certainly been extremely violent, openly punitive drives are conducted with even more impunity—accompanied by arbitrary detentions, custodial beatings, and an absolute lack of rehabilitative measures. ⁸

More recently, demolition drives have been coupled with deportation drives: a state policy that has become normalized across various countries such as the US, Australia, Britain, Pakistan, Iran, Mauritania, and the EU (Deutsche Welle, 2025; Dunn and Skrdlik, 2025; Hussain, 2025; Kanno-Youngs and Aleaziz, 2025; Nader, 2025; Tian, 2025). In India, deportation drives have followed large-scale demolitions, creating conditions for the internal and external displacement of Muslims by rendering them either homeless or homeless and stateless. In summer 2025, the Indian government embarked on a concerted hunt to expel the so-called “terrorists” and “infiltrators” from the country, particularly from Gujarat, Assam, and Delhi (Verma et al., 2025). The lives of Muslim workers in slums and informal housing were completely upended as they were forcefully detained and deported to Bangladesh, including pregnant women and children (Hasnat and Baskar, 2025).

In one of the worst instances, a large-scale operation at Chandola Lake, Gujarat, and the state demolished around 10,000 structures between April and May 2025. In midnight raids, security forces picked up thousands of Muslims who were beaten in custody and forced to walk barefoot in the scorching summer heat (Verma et al., 2025). Some workers were deported to Bangladesh, while those who were released returned to broken homes and lost belongings. Many spent days in police custody, facing an uncertain future and the prospect of homelessness. Workers were threatened and tortured into false confessions of being Bangladeshi. Security forces continued this violence while transporting detainees to Bangladesh.

The ordeal often did not end there, with the Bangladeshi government ordering the return of deported workers, forcing them to walk miles to cross back into Indian Territory (Ellis-Petersen and Rahman, 2025). One worker, taken from Gujarat, testified that “security forces assaulted him with steel pipes and wires” for three days during transport and beat him with belts for 15 days to coerce a statement. Another deportee recorded that he was forced to jump off the ship that carried him, and was told by armed officials that “if you look back, we will shoot you” (Verma et al., 2025). An estimated 1880 people have been deported to Bangladesh in 2025 through such operations—a process that has invariably been accompanied by bulldozer drives to destroy Muslim workers’ homes and livelihoods. Within the triangular network of urban beautification, “bulldozer justice,” and deportation drives, Bengali Muslim migrant workers have become a highly precarious, cheap surplus labor force within urban economies.

The “Global” city: Forced evictions and world-class dreams

The use of bulldozer drives to target India's Muslims has been on the rise alongside another long-term trend which has shaped India's urban economy and aesthetic: the urge to produce “world-class” cities. This larger context and India's long-standing use of demolition drives (urban and rural) in the name of development are critical to understanding the current politics of “bulldozer justice” and its relationship to the urban informal economy.

The aesthetic of the “world-class” city emerged as a defining aspiration across many newly independent nation-states in the Global South in a competitive bid to “catch up” to the West (Ghertner, 2015). The drive to make cities “modern” urban spaces that would appeal on the global stage through technological and infrastructural transformations, thereby attracting tourism, private investment, and construction projects, became a defining feature of the nationalist modernization agenda. This urban process has not been based on improving civic amenities and welfare measures, closing wage gaps, or providing safe, secure, and decent housing to workers. Instead, it is sustained by removing anyone or anything that does not meet this aspiration of a “world-class” city (Dupont et al., 2015). State projects toward this end have violently displaced workers who live in informal housing and slum clusters. In cases when displacement was not realistic (after all, the city would be dysfunctional without this informal labor), workers’ housing has simply been hidden away behind hastily constructed walls and tin sheets.

During mega-events and international state visits, demolition drives spike periodically, such as during the Asian Games 1982 (Delhi), the Commonwealth Games 2010 (Delhi), the FIFA Under-17 World Cup 2017 (Kolkata), Donald Trump's visit to India (2020), and the G20 Summit 2023 (Delhi). Deadlines set by mega-events become the basis of violent land accumulation by private companies. ⁹ These demolitions heavily target workers living in slums, who constitute a large portion of the informal urban economy, turning cleared land into new real estate for developers (Davis, 2006; Gillespie, 2020). Notably, these events also involved large construction projects, bringing migrant workers into the city who provide the necessary labor to produce the urban landscape in line with the “world-class” aesthetic, while also being displaced from the city.

The 1982 Asian Games, hosted in Delhi, provide one of the earliest examples of urban restructuring in India to create an “international” city capable of hosting participants from 33 nations and managing a large tourist footfall. ¹⁰ The city's winning bid to host the Asian Games led to the construction of a new airport, new sports facilities, hotels, flyovers, and stadiums, all within a specified time frame consistent with the Games’ deadline. Around 150,000 migrant workers were employed on Delhi's construction sites in 1982, many as bonded labor (Lin and Patnaik, 1982; Fernandes, 1986). Land cleared by the government was handed over to private companies for construction projects. As construction neared completion, migrant workers were displaced to keep them out of the sight of incoming visitors. Slum dwellers and homeless populations were also rounded up and forcibly evicted from the city. Workers were denied minimum wages, adequate living conditions, and health and safety protections, resulting in numerous fatalities. The numbers are uncertain, as workers told People's Union for Democratic Rights investigators that “bodies of the victims are simply disposed of and the injured are sent back to their villages” (PUDR, 2009).

The Commonwealth Games 2010 tell a similar story of displacement. ¹¹ In order to give Delhi a “facelift” as a prosperous, modern “world-class” city, the state displaced around 200,000 people in the run-up to the Games, carrying out mass demolition drives and violently enforcing the expulsion of workers as well as their removal from public view (HLRN, 2011). Many of these displaced workers had come to Delhi during the Asian Games as construction labor (Puri and Bhatia, 2010). Contractors grossly underpaid migrant workers for construction projects and failed to provide safe working conditions and adequate housing amenities. Somewhere between 45 and 70 workers died for this “world-class” dream. Workers who came to Delhi to rebuild the city were among the first to bear the cost of urban redevelopment due to bulldozer drives and abysmal working conditions. As Sengupta (2010: 439) puts it, the “image of national prosperity projected during the Games is built on the backs of the poor, who were punished multiple times: by the diversion of public funds for spectacular projects, by the decimation of their communities and neighborhoods, and by their direct exploitation as underpaid workers and desperate evictees.”

The Indian government has also followed this familiar policy of displacement and eviction to maintain the vision of a “world-class” aesthetic during international visits. Along with the underlying ideological and nationalist basis of these displacements, international visits also provide the basis for an accelerated real estate accumulation for private interests. In 2020, the government built a four-foot wall to hide slums in Ahmedabad along President Trump's designated travel route (Al Jazeera, 2020). It forcibly evicted 45 families in the vicinity of Trump's planned visit sites (The Guardian, 2020). More recently, Delhi witnessed the highest number of demolitions nationwide in 2023. Around 300,000 people were forcibly evicted to “beautify” the city for the G20 Summit (HLRN, 2024). Demolition drives took place without notice, despite court stay orders, and did not provide compensation or resettlement to those evicted (Malpani, 2023).

Bulldozer drives for mega-events remain ongoing. In 2025, Ahmedabad won the bid to host the 2030 Commonwealth Games. Mass demolition drives, using JCB equipment, have already begun in the run-up to the Games. Since November 2025, the state has bulldozed over 900 residential and commercial structures at a conservative estimate (Indian Express, 2025). Informal workers have borne the brunt of these operations. The state has promised rehabilitation for residents who can prove that they moved into their homes before 2010, using the rhetoric of removing dangerous “infiltrators” (read Muslim migrants) from the city. Documents produced by workers are often declared unofficial or fraudulent (Aswani, 2026). Promises of resettlement remain hollow for migrant workers who form the backbone of the urban informal economy.

In all these cases, workers who were forcibly evicted had to rebuild unauthorized housing elsewhere in the city, becoming trapped in rounds of displacement. Given the mutual reliance between this urban economy and informal labor, workers are constantly internally displaced within the city to “beautify” the city. This cycle of displacement, as Baviskar (2019) has argued, is integral to India's urban developmental logic. As she puts it, the city's “dreams of urban cleansing are fragile; ultimately they will collapse under the weight of their hubris. The city still needs the poor; it needs their labor, enterprise, and ingenuity. The vegetable vendor and the rickshaw puller, the cook and the carpenter cannot be banished forever. If the urban center is deprived of their presence, the center itself will have to shift.”

Urbanization, accumulation, and displacement

Construction projects undertaken after slum clearances are either carried out through PPPs or by handing over the cleared land to private contractors and companies, which then develop it into lucrative real estate (Birch et al., 2016). In a comparative study of Accra and Delhi, Hazarika argues that neoliberal urban redevelopment projects expand the “real-estate frontier” by directly seizing urban land from the public (Hazarika, 2020). For example, the Adani Group holds an 80% stake in the Dharavi slum redevelopment project, having invested 950 million USD in it. Private developers and companies secure partnerships through competitive bidding (NDTV, 2025).

This PPP model for urban redevelopment has been adopted across Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4, and metropolitan cities since the 1990s (Dupont and Ramanathan, 2008; HLRN, 2024). For example, 10,000 houses were demolished in Hyderabad between 1990 and 2010 to construct it as an IT hub (informally known as Cyberabad) (Kranthi and Rao, 2009). Similarly, in 2013, over 5000 residents of the Ejipura slum in Bengaluru were forcibly evicted to build a new shopping complex in partnership with Maverick Holdings Ltd. This was the second time in 20 years that these residents had been displaced, having built new informal housing structures adjacent to the site of the first eviction (Navya, 2022).

The provision of compensation, rehabilitation, and resettlement, while never particularly adequate, has declined since the 1990s (Dupont and Ramanathan, 2008). In Delhi and Mumbai, resettlement sites are increasingly peripheral to the city, separating displaced workers from their worksites and community ties (DRAN, 2014; Tupe, 2025). Welfare policies have often harmed more than helped. For example, the central government's Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana is based on the PPP model, delegating the responsibility of providing alternative housing to slum dwellers to private companies. Ironically, this scheme has contributed to the crisis of forced displacement, with slums being cleared to develop new complexes and only some residents being eligible for rehabilitation (HLRN, 2024). Various states have systematized PPPs as the foremost mechanism for demolition and rehabilitation drives. This rehabilitation model has, as Hazarika (2020) argues, acted as an “active state prioritization of catering to private capital and interests over upgrading existing housing or ensuring basic service delivery for citizens residing in these informal settlements.” Neither the state nor private companies have provided secure, viable alternative housing for displaced residents (Ghosh, 2025). Displaced populations are placed at the margins of the city, in poorly constructed high-rises that lack proper electricity and water facilities, or in cramped and unsanitary alternative housing with sewage flows, unsafe water supplies, and locations near garbage dumps (Siddiqui, 2022).

Given the long-standing relationship between regular beautification drives and a sectarian rhetoric justifying them, many of the mass “punitive” demolitions carried out under the current regime cannot be separated from the larger economy of forcible evictions. “Bulldozer justice” serves the broader political and economic interests of developers, state officials, private corporations, and construction companies. Forced evictions for economic “development” become a means to capture real estate for private actors. However, while this larger developmental agenda continues to target migrant workers in the city, the association between punitive demolitions and economically driven demolitions has solidified (Bulldozer Justice: How Unlawful Demolitions are Targeting India's Marginalised Communities, 2024). This politics of “bulldozer justice” in Modi's India has strengthened and deepened existing ties between sectarian rhetoric and developmental policies and introduced a new component of explicitly punitive demolitions that target Muslims.

Conclusion

Demolition drives have characterized the production and restructuring of India's postcolonial urban spaces and have been a key mechanism for maintaining a cheap and informal labor force. As Davis (2006) argues, slums in the Global South have been a structurally produced, globally linked form of urban deprivation that arose after decolonization under neoliberalism, which he terms the creation of “postcolonial poverty.” Developmental strategies, rather than addressing the housing crisis, have reproduced it. Slum demolition drives and the continued existence of slums in urban India have been two sides of the same coin—both functioning as mechanisms that further destabilize already precarious migrant workers whose cheap labor remains central to the urban economy.

Even prior to the last decade, anti-Muslim rhetoric has circulated across multiple instances of displacement and has been used to deny evicted workers rehabilitation. During the Commonwealth Games, for example, the state used the rhetoric of expelling “anti-national” elements and foreign “infiltrators” from the city as a basis for its demolition drives. Similar logics have been cited to impose eligibility criteria on who qualifies for rehabilitation. In many cases, residents have had to establish long-term residence through official documentation to ensure that only “rightful” residents are allowed to secure housing rights, while “infiltrators” are excluded through this process. This anti-Muslim rhetoric has not only been amplified recently, but targeted demolitions have emerged as a distinct political category and expansive state policy.

“Bulldozer justice” as a term indicates both the deepening religious basis of demolition drives and their extrajudicial nature—the Hindutva state's direct dispensation of justice against supposed enemies of the state, functioning within a broader moral framework that does not require adherence to legal limits. However, even in the current moment, “development” remains a major cause of demolitions—equally unjust and violent. Like so-called “bulldozer justice,” such demolition drives receive little attention in the press. While there is an ideological basis to punitive demolition drives through the legitimation of rule within a Hindu nation, constitutional structures and courts of law have rarely protected evictees in practice across different instances and justifications for demolitions. Demolition drives, across a spectrum of reasons and rationales, have reproduced urban spaces that function on the intertwined logic of producing and destroying slums in a continuous cycle.

Even as deportation drives have become another brutal characteristic of the Hindutva project of producing a Hindu nation, they serve another crucial purpose. While sizable in number, only a minority percentage of workers are actually deported in the aftermath of demolition drives. A far greater number, running into the thousands, are released and must rebuild their lives and homes in unforgiving conditions structured by the urban economy and spatial landscape. Rather than thinking primarily through the categories of just/unjust or legal/illegal, it may be more useful to reckon with the never-ending cycle of slum demolitions as an increasingly integral aspect of India's urban landscape and the production of precarious and cheap labor, which struggles to secure even the basic conditions necessary for its own reproduction, including housing and essential amenities.

Under the Hindutva regime, targeted demolitions in Muslim-majority areas with an evidently repressive dimension, slum demolitions for “development” that disproportionately impact Muslims, and deportation drives in the wake of mass demolitions have converged around the bulldozer as both slogan and vehicle for the so-called “justice” and economic prosperity.