Indian court asks if Nuh demolitions aimed at targeting Muslims

An Indian court has put forward questions over the recent demolitions tearing down the houses and businesses of mainly Muslim residents in the northern state of Haryana carried out on Monday.

The court asked whether the government-led demolitions were an act of exclusively targeting the Muslim community in the region.

“The issue also arises whether the buildings belonging to a particular community are being brought down under the guise of law and order problem and an exercise of ethnic cleansing is being conducted by the state’’, the Punjab and Haryana High Court said on Monday, commanding a cessation to four days of bulldozing of properties in the state’s Nuh district.

The bench of Justice GS Sandhawalia and Justice Harpreet Kaur Jeewan also said that the state authorities had conducted the demolition drive “without following the procedure established by law” or issuing any prior notices to the people owning the properties, legal news website LiveLaw reported.

Hundreds of homes, shops, and shanties have been demolished by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Nuh, Haryana, which is the state’s only Muslim-majority district as per the report by Al Jazeera.

Many rights groups have condemned the long history of BJP’s bulldozing of Muslim-owned properties including possible suspects and alleged political dissenters. These demolitions have been described as a common practice in the states governed by the ruling party.

In January last year, Gregory Stanton, the founder, and director of Genocide Watch, a non-governmental organization he launched in 1999, told a United States congressional briefing that genocide of Muslims could take place in India.

“We are warning that genocide could very well happen in India,” Stanton said, signaling towards early “signs and processes” of it in the northeastern Indian state of Assam and Indian-administered Kashmir.

Nearly a month before Stanton’s statement, A group of Hindu religious leaders called for a Muslim genocide, along the banks of the River Ganges in the northern Indian town of Haridwar.

Videos by Dharm Sansad (religious parliament) showed many Hindu monks openly calling for the genocide of Muslims in India, saying Hindus should kill Muslims. Many of the monks have also close ties with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP.

Since BJP came into power in 2014, many of its representatives and ministers have been accused of making alleged public comments threatening India’s Muslim community.

Stanton said genocide was “not an event but a process” as he juxtaposed parallels between the policies executed by the BJP government in India and Myanmar’s military attacks on the Rohingya Muslim minority in 2017, killing thousands, raping women, and burning their villages.