Two Demolitions, One Crisis: Bulldozer Politics Is Undermining the Courts

Two days. Two courts. Two orders. Two demolitions.

On 1 April, a bench of Justice Abhay Oka and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan of the took a sledgehammer to the Prayagraj Development’s Authority's demolition of five houses in 2021.

The next day, a division bench of Justice Gadkari and Justice Khata of the Bombay High Court ordered the demolition of a wholly illegal construction in Thane, also ordering action against the municipal officer it said was delaying action.

The two cases lie in entirely different spheres; reconciling them, and other orders on demolition, can be confusing. And yet, beneath the apparent chaos, there is a common factor to all these cases. It is a profoundly disturbing one.

Contrasting Approaches to Demolition

Let’s take the latest cases in turn. The Supreme Court order is not available so far, but it has been widely reported and quoted. In 2021, the Prayagraj Development Authority (PDA) demolished five houses. One belonged to a lawyer. Another to a professor. The demolition was done on 7 March, 2021. They, and the others affected were indeed given notice — just a day before, on 6 March, 2021. 

Now consider this scenario: you are slapped with a notice that gives you 24 hours saying your construction is illegal and is liable to be demolished. What are you to do? There is no time to move to get a lawyer, let alone move a court.

The Supreme Court rejected the PDA’s argument that the buildings were illegal, and therefore the action was justified. It ordered compensation: Rs 10 lakhs to each of the affected persons. The PDA argued that the persons affected ‘were not poor’ and had other houses, and that ‘illegality should not be compensated’ (going by news reports).

The PDA’s argument misses the point entirely. The question is not about legality or illegality on its own, but about the process—how action is taken, within what time, and whether something resembling a fair opportunity of showing cause against the proposed action is afforded. 

The order shows precisely this. It noted that despite several opportunities, the person who had put up the construction could not show a single valid building permission. The court ordered the demolition of the entire structure, and action against the officer it found was delaying action.

In the PDA case, this is precisely what the Supreme Court said. There is, it held, a prescribed procedure, a process mandated by law before demolition can be effected, and a 24-hour notice does not conform to this procedural norm.

The Supreme Court found that no attempt had been made at all to serve notices personally or by registered post. There was only a notice dated 1 March that was served on 6 March with demolition scheduled for the day after. The Supreme Court described the process as both illegal and inhuman, and said the cases shocked the judicial conscience.

The Erosion of the Rule of Law

Two observations must be noted for they lie at the root. The first is the court’s observation that such actions are contrary to the ‘rule of law’, a basic feature of our Constitution.

The second is the court’s determination to teach the authorities a lesson and to discourage them from ever attempting such actions ‘without following due procedure’.

Bulldozer justice, as it has come to be known, is a relatively recent executive phenomenon, pestilential in its implementation, pustulant in its effect. It is, apparently, also extremely contagious.

Earlier in March, portions of six houses in the Bharuch district in Gujarat were demolished by a family of a married woman after she eloped with a divorced man from her village. That very month, in Morbi, Gujarat, an allegedly illegal portion of a house was demolished. It belonged to a person the police believed to be a bootlegger’s brother. The family had threatened and attacked the police and even dared them to take action.

On 13 November, 2024, a Supreme Court bench of Justice Gavai and Justice Viswanathan delivered a 51 page landmark ruling simply captioned “In re: Directions in the matter of demolition of structures”. It took the bulldozer justice executive action paradigm head-on and held it to be entirely illegal

It, too, invoked the threat to the rule of law, and it issued what many wrongly claimed was a blanket ban on all demolitions. It did nothing of the kind. It said its directions would not apply to the demolition of unauthorised structures on public places or where there was a court order.

It issued detailed instructions — and it is remarkable that these were even necessary — for giving adequate notice (from the date of service of the notice), the contents of the notice and so forth. A hearing is to be given. There has to be an order and an opportunity to challenge it, for which a fortnight’s time is to be afforded. All demolitions are to be videographed. 

Justice Bhuyan of the Supreme Court, speaking at a public event recently, said that bulldozing houses without notice was like bulldozing the Constitution. It negates, he said, the very concept of the rule of law and—this is important—threatens the entire justice delivery system.

Just because someone is an accused or even convicted does not mean that his house should be demolished. Justice Bhuyan remarked that there was a need to introspect, to examine if ‘we’ (by which I believe he means courts and our society) have gone wrong, and if the judiciary needs a course correction.

A Justice System in Peril

Something is certainly amiss, and I believe it is serious. Common to all these cases is an element of utter disregard for what the Supreme Court has repeatedly called ‘the rule of law’.

Worse yet, there is now an overt disdain for the authority of our courts and their orders. Nothing else explains the actions of these authorities and even private parties. Justice Bhuyan is correct in saying this is a time for introspection and a re-evaluation. 

At least part of the problem is an impatience with the slowness of our judicial system. Glaciers melt faster than cases are decided runs the common thinking, and the results are far from consistent.

There is also a dangerous indifference to something central to judicial decision-making — the correctness of the procedure applied and followed. After all, if the person is, say, a ‘known’ bootlegger, why should a ‘process’ matter at all? Certainly no process, public perception goes, should allow the bootlegger or the developer of an illegal structure to escape unscathed. 

This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the process by which law is administered. Audi alteram partem — hear the other side, or let no party go unheard — is possibly the most basic postulate of any adversarial decision-making system anywhere.

This demands that the process is person-agnostic; as Justice Bhuyan said, it matters not if she or he is accused or convicted. What matters is how the decision is made. That must be fair, reasonable and must afford an opportunity of defence: precisely Justice Gavai’s directions in the bulldozer justice directions case.

Time for Reform

Of all the professions we know, the practice of litigation in law courts is the only one that always takes in an open, public forum. There are those in other professions much given to deriding the judicial system and its disproportionate consumption of time. Odious comparisons are drawn with medical diagnoses and accounting advisories.

But these are not systems that demand a hearing of opposing narratives, and I dare say that if any doctor or accountant finds himself a defendant or an accused and that same yardstick is applied of a decision without giving them a hearing they will be violent remonstrations — and demands for adjournments to ‘file their say’. 

The rule of law, which many decisions invoke, including the most recent one by Justice Oka in the PDA case simply means that no person is above the law; all must bend the knee to the law, and the administration of justice demands fidelity to the established process.

Our collective error, one that Justice Bhuyan hints it, is that we have, if anything, been too lax in this regard. High sounding phrases do not substitute for targeted action. No government officer who takes peremptory action contrary to law has ever lost his or her job or made to personally pay a price.

This must change. Perhaps the PDA judgment is the first and long overdue step in that direction and, I would venture to add, so is the Bombay High Court decision demanding accountability from the officer in charge of enforcing court orders. 

And perhaps it is also a time to reflect on what we can do to modernise, simplify and quicken our existing procedures, some of which date back a century. We have for too long ignored these. Merely converting paper records into digital ones achieves nothing.

The demand for swift and righteous justice is not unreasonable. But it does require introspection, considerable soul-searching and then a concerted effort to change so that those in charge of administering the law realise that they are never beyond the reach of either the long arm of the law or the strong arm of the law. A society that ignores law is a society in decay. The warning signs are all around us. We ignore them at our peril.

(Justice Gautam Patel is a former Bombay High Court Judge, currently the Distinguished Professor of Practice at DM Harish School of Law. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)