In the northern Indian metropolis 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 households are Muslim, and every little thing — houses, faculties and mosques — was to be demolished. The story rightly made worldwide headlines, and ultimately, the nation’s Supreme Court put a maintain on the eviction for now, arguing that authorities wanted to provide you with a resettlement and rehabilitation plan first.

Yet the incident in Haldwani, 296km (184 miles) from nationwide capital New Delhi, captures a broader sample of injustice masquerading as regulation and order that’s enjoying out throughout India beneath the majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which guidelines federally and in most states.

The bulldozer is central to this technique. Muslims are the goal. And not like in Haldwani, affected individuals and communities solely not often get even a short lived reprieve.

Nowhere is that this extra evident than within the northeastern state of Assam, some 2,000km (1,242 miles) away from New Delhi, the place the BJP has dominated since 2016. Thousands of Muslim families have been forcibly evicted since 2021 from land they’d been residing on for many years. Since 2016, police have shot at and killed protesters in at the very least two instances.

The marketing campaign to render households homeless has picked up steam in latest weeks. On December 19, about 250 households had been evicted within the Nagaon district of Assam. Per week later, 47 households’ houses had been destroyed in Barpeta district. In the Lakhimpur district, tons of of households had been evicted in early January.

These numbers are simply the tip of the iceberg. There’s a technique to the insanity. The Miya Muslim group — whose ancestors, many generations in the past, settled in Assam from East Bengal, then an integral a part of British India (and now Bangladesh) — is going through the brunt of the evictions and demolitions.

The community is often targeted, particularly by the Hindu proper, as “illegal immigrants” and the phrase “Miya” is regularly used as a pejorative. Last 12 months, authorities arrested Miya Muslims who had arrange a museum devoted to the group’s cultural artefacts. Assam’s BJP Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma successfully accused museum organisers of cultural appropriation, arguing that the objects on show weren’t distinctive to the Miya Muslim group.

The thought behind the inhuman and violent evictions is to maintain Muslims landless and impoverished: Muslims have the next poverty fee and decrease literacy fee than the nationwide common. Research has proven that Indian Muslims have decrease upward mobility than individuals from even these Hindu castes and tribes which have historically been discriminated in opposition to.

In Assam, landlessness is a continual downside amongst marginalised teams, accentuated by annual floods and the perennial downside of riverbank erosions. Many susceptible communities decide on government-owned land as they appear to earn a residing by working amongst native communities and on farmland.

Instead of addressing this downside of landlessness, the Assam authorities is singling out Miya Muslims from amongst these occupying state-owned land, solely due to their religion, and is evicting them.

Elsewhere, this epidemic of evictions is getting used to both collectively punish Muslims or assault activists from the group who’ve dared to boost their voices in opposition to authorities injustices.

In New Delhi, houses of Muslims had been demolished — together with for some time after a Supreme Court order to halt the pressured eviction — last April, days after inter-religious rigidity within the neighbourhood. In the state of Uttar Pradesh, authorities demolished the houses of Muslims who had protested in opposition to controversial remarks by a BJP spokesperson in opposition to Prophet Muhammad final July. The state of Madhya Pradesh — additionally dominated by the BJP — has used the identical tactic, too.

These are assaults on the rights of residents. The authorities equipment, with gigantic police forces in riot gear, excavators and in some circumstances even elephants, perform the evictions. In most circumstances, the demolitions have been carried out with none warning or authorized notices.

At one among Assam’s eviction websites, individuals who had their houses demolished arrange tarpaulin tents by the roadside. Government officers got here and eliminated even that non permanent shelter. Where are they speculated to go now? I had no reply. When I requested these rendered homeless, they didn’t, both.

This is barbaric. This is merciless. It isn’t simply houses that these persons are shedding. Often, their standing crops are destroyed, their bushes felled. Even bogs are was rubble. In many circumstances, the victims are poor, and are pressured to sleep within the open in harsh climate — usually hungry, and with out entry to meals or clear water. Women don’t have the privateness of a rest room.

Their plight and losses are principally invisible in mainstream information. The civil society representing minorities has no house within the media, and the civil society representing the bulk is silent. Perhaps that’s why Abdul Khaleque, amongst these evicted in Lalung Gaon of Nagaon district stated to me: “Let the government shoot us; we do not have any place to go.”

Of course, Miya Muslims, and marginalised communities in India extra broadly, aren’t unfamiliar with the violence unleashed on them by the state and by non-state actors. In Assam, Miya Muslims have lengthy had their citizenship questioned — they’re regularly othered as encroachers who’re by some means, not Assamese.

Evictions are the most recent weapon to target Muslims in Assam and throughout India. While the Supreme Court intervened within the Haldwani case, it’s unclear whether or not others who’ve suffered will ever obtain justice.

And that, in the end, is the most important casualty of what the BJP and its governments are doing. Their bulldozers are demolishing the very idea of justice for Indian Muslims.

The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.