Equating ‘bulldozer justice’ with a lawless state of affairs where might is right, the Supreme Court of India on November 13 laid down pan-India guidelines and said no property should be demolished without a prior show cause notice and the affected must be given 15 days to respond. The apex court said that the executive cannot assume judicial powers to punish citizens by demolishing their properties without following due process. It also termed such excesses as “high-handed and arbitrary” and that they need to be dealt with the “heavy hand of the law.”
A bench of Justices B R Gavai and K V Viswanathan described as “chilling” the sight of a bulldozer demolishing a building, rendering women, children and aged persons homeless overnight. “If the executive acts as a judge and inflicts penalty of demolition on a citizen on the ground that he is an accused, it violates the principle of ‘separation of powers’,” the bench said in its 95-page judgment. The Supreme Court also laid down pan-India guidelines on demolition of properties and said the executive cannot become a judge, declare an accused as guilty and demolish his house.
In the past, demolitions were carried out by several state authorities without sufficient notice. Many BJP-ruled states, especially the Uttar Pradesh government, have been receiving flak from various quarters over use of bulldozers to demolish the homes of persons accused of crimes. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said the Supreme Court has “parked the bulldozer in the garage forever”, remarks that were seen as a dig at the Yogi Adityanath government. With the Supreme Court applying brakes on bulldozer action, the ‘bulldozer justice’ by state governments would now end.
The top court’s verdict has brought justice to those who suffered and to those who would have suffered in the future because of state governments targeting of the poor and particularly of minority communities. Now the Supreme Court has also opened the gates for the prosecution of all those people who committed such illegality in the past, be it in any state of India. The country’s law and order and administration cannot be run by use of ‘bulldozer’. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s judgement is a historic one as far as civil liberties are concerned.
