'No hashtag could save our house'

“It could happen to any Muslim family,” Afreen Fatima, then 24 years old, told Article14, 12 hours before her nightmare came true.

The BJP government in Uttar Pradesh accused her father of masterminding a riot in Allahabad, detained her mother and sister, declared their home illegal, and demolished it on 12 June 2022 in a feverish spectacle beamed on news channels. Afterwards, reporters picked through the debris left by the bulldozers.

In the year that followed, the State slapped baseless case after case and a preventive detention order against her father Javed Mohammad, a businessman and prominent social activist in the city who had been critical of the BJP amid rising Islamophobia, but also worked closely with the local administration over local matters concerning Muslims.

“A dehumanising year,” is how Fatima described it.

A linguistics graduate from Aligarh Muslim University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, she was then a fiery activist, far more outspoken about the plight of Muslims under the BJP than her mild-mannered father. But as energies shifted to securing his release from jail, she seemingly stepped back from the frontlines.

When Mohammad was released after 21 months in jail [on 16 March 2024], after securing bail in all eight cases against him, he told Article 14, “Is it not the limit? First, they slapped five cases, then the NSA, then three more, then the Gangster Act, then the Arms Act. It is only because of God’s mercy that I have come out. This injustice is an atrocity.”

Over three-and-a-half years after authorities arrested Fatima’s father and demolished his family home, citing illegal construction, no formal charges have been filed against the alleged mastermind of the UP riots triggered by a BJP leader’s controversial remarks about the Prophet Mohammad.

The Allahabad High Court is yet to hear the petition filed by Fatima’s mother challenging the demolition, which was carried out in violation of due process, including the required notice period and the right to contest the order, despite being listed 60 times since July 2022.

Just as lynchings, violence and the public humiliation of Muslims have become routine, extrajudicial and punitive demolitions of their homes have also become increasingly common, despite a 2024 ruling of the Supreme Court that state authorities cannot demolish a person’s property merely because they are accused or convicted of a crime, prohibiting such actions without proper legal procedure.

The spectacle surrounding these demolitions often gives them a celebratory feel, one that appears to carry social sanction, and has earned Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath the nickname ‘Bulldozer Baba’.

Fatima, now 27, is a researcher with the Polis Project, a New York-based non-profit documenting Islamophobia and State oppression around the world. She documented 53 incidents of extrajudicial and punitive demolitions in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Haryana from 2019to 2024.

The highest number of incidents was in UP (33), followed by Madhya Pradesh (16), Delhi (3) and Haryana (1). The highest number of houses or structures demolished was in Haryana (1,208), followed by Madhya Pradesh (112), Uttar Pradesh (35) and Delhi (22).

‘While state justifications may vary, from fighting the “land mafia” to responding to “riots” or taking action against “illegal construction”, the core logic remains that of collective retribution. In many cases, demolitions target the families and communities of accused individuals, often before such individuals are even convicted by courts, or even before any legal process has begun,’ the report said. ‘Overwhelmingly, the homes reduced to rubble belong to Muslims, often the poorest or the most outspoken among them.’

In this interview, Afreen Fatima spoke to Betwa Sharma of Article 14 about the lasting emotional impact of the demolition, the failure of the courts, her reason to document other demolitions, and the pattern that she sees across them.

You experienced the demolition of your home, and then you decided to document other such demolitions.

Muslims are written about, but Muslims don’t get a chance to write about themselves. Proximity to violence and injustice brings out narratives that may not come from a safe distance. I talked to so many journalists and researchers, I repeated the same story over and over, but when the report came out, I always felt something was missing. It’s not what I wanted to say. I also wanted to voice what the State is trying to do. I’m not sure I’ve succeeded, but I’ve tried.

Have you recovered from the demolition?

I don’t think it’s something a person recovers from. Of course, life goes on, we move ahead, and it becomes a fading memory. But if you think about it, it all feels very fresh. Sometimes it feels like it happened long ago, and sometimes it feels like it just happened. When I talk to my sisters, it reminds me that the home of our childhood memories is no longer there.

Has it become easier to cope with?

I went to see the house two months after it was broken. Every single time, I try to remember my life in that home, it’s very dark. Even if it’s a happy memory of me holding my brother’s son, it’s still dark.

There’s rubble all around. I’m unable to erase the rubble from my memories. I can’t remember my house without the rubble anymore. It is very unsettling for me — why can’t I remember my home without the rubble?

There were a lot of other things happening at the time: your father was arrested and jailed, your mother and sister were illegally detained. It must have amplified the trauma.

Actually, what happened was the opposite. The trauma of Abbu being arrested, of not knowing where Ammi and Sumaiya were for 24 hours, then their illegal detention for almost two days. Until Abbu was released, we never really had the chance to sit with the fact that our home had been demolished. We pushed the trauma [away]. When Abbu was released, we had to relive the fact that that he lost his home, too. He lost his father and his sister while he was in jail. It feels like injustice after injustice.

Sometimes, my younger sister and I would put ourselves in Abbu’s position. My pain is nothing compared to his pain or my mother’s. She was separated from her partner for two years. I did not allow myself to grieve the house because Abbu was not around.

You no longer speak publicly. Has the nature of your activism changed?

It is more low-profile. If someone tells me to come to a protest, I go. I’ve always been academically engaged with activism. After the house was demolished, I stepped back from social media because I found it was not useful to tweet and post. No hashtag could stop my house from being demolished. I stopped posting.

I wrote papers, and I read a lot. It made more sense to put my energy into research work. There were also Abbu’s cases. So, we were either with the lawyer or travelling from Allahabad to Deoria to meet Abbu.

What’s behind the delay in your High Court petition against the demolition?

We filed our petition in July 2022. Initially, every two weeks, we would be given a date, but for some reason or another, the case would not be taken up in court. We mentioned that it was urgent — it was just us three women, Sumaiya, Ammi and me. I was not married at the time. I can only assume the judge considered it not urgent because the house had already been demolished. The few times it was taken up, the judge did not come back after lunch.

Some reason or other comes up: either summer vacation or the judge will recuse or the bench will change or the government lawyer will pick another date. There was a period when our case was not listed for five or six months. We moved a petition in the Supreme Court seeking that the High Court take it up and expedite our hearing. We wrote letters to the chief justice of Allahabad. Our matter is before the chief justice’s bench, but the arguments have not started.

I remember I was in court for Abbu’s bail hearing, and the petition was listed the same day. One lawyer remarked, “Until the government changes, your matter will not be heard. You will just have to make your peace with it.” There’s some system behind the delay, but what exactly it is, is hard to pinpoint.

What is the prayer?

That our home was illegally demolished, that we be compensated and the officials responsible be punished. That we be given a temporary home until we get compensated.

How did you get started on the work of documenting other demolitions?

Initially, it was supposed to be pan-India. I realised it wouldn’t be possible because of [the hurdle of] regional languages. Gujarat and Assam are probably the states with the most demolitions, but there was a language problem.

Most of the cases are not reported in English dailies. I stuck with Haryana, Delhi, MP and UP and compiled the data from 2019 to 2024, reviewing legal documents and reports from other human rights organisations, examining the urban planning laws in these states, and the court decisions.

What struck you most about the cases you covered?

It’s the same playbook. Speaking to victims from Kanpur and Saharanpur, it felt like a copy-paste of what happened to us. It’s strange that this is not apparent to people. Like communal riots, every single demolition has the same orchestration, but we are unable to link them. It’s always punitive, always extrajudicial.

People like Mukhtar Ansari and Ateeq Ahmed, their criminality is one thing, but does that suspend their right to be treated under the law? No one’s home should be demolished. You have to punish me under the law. The victims are from different social strata, but the cases are chillingly similar.

Governments say they’re demolishing illegal constructions.

We have only taken cases that were extrajudicial in nature. The house might have been illegal or on encroached land, but did the development authority follow due process? As an individual, I might do something illegal, but can an authority or an official do something illegal?

Some part of the due process is missing in all the cases: notice was not given, or if it was, then just 30 minutes before [the demolition]. The other filter was whether a demolition was to punish a particular individual and their family.

Most demolitions in India happen extrajudicially. Even the cases we haven’t taken up are extrajudicial because development authorities do not follow the law.

These demolitions continue despite the Supreme Court ruling.

What does the Supreme Court do to enforce these guidelines? Nothing. The Supreme Court places the onus on individual officers involved in the demolition, but does not question the political logic behind it.

In most cases, the individual DM (district magistrate) or development authority officer is not acting of their own free will. There is political messaging around demolitions. Some violence occurs, some riot erupts — somebody has to be punished. The collective ‘conscience’ has to be ‘satisfied’.

The Supreme Court did not once question the ideology or logic behind the demolitions. The Supreme Court did mention their punitive nature, but did not mention who is being punished. We are being punished because of our identity, and if the Supreme Court is not going to spell it out, then it serves no purpose. It does very little to challenge the impunity enjoyed by different officers, CMs, ministers and politicians.

There is no enforceability, nor is there follow-up. The Supreme Court guidelines mandate that every state maintain a demolition website where demolition notices, responses and orders are to be made public, but not a single state does.

Betwa Sharma is managing editor of Article 14. This is a shorter version of the original piece, published with permission