Dear reader, "The bulldozer is at the door, due process is underfoot, and the Supreme Court cannot unsee the danger. The sequence of events speaks for itself: At Jahangirpuri in northwest Delhi Wednesday morning, seven bulldozers rolled in, accompanied by over 1,000 policemen, to demolish "illegal encroachments" in an area still tense because of the flaring of communal violence on the occasion of Hanuman Jayanti on Saturday - and they continued on their mission to raze for well over an hour after the Supreme Court ordered them to pause. Evidently, the BJP-led North Delhi Municipal Corporation follows the BJP's agenda ardently, even when the Court directs it to hold its hand, even when it goes against the law. At Jahangirpuri, the fig leaf-of illegal constructions - is so thin it does not even require a puff of Delhi's acrid air to be blown away. After all, in dense urban sprawls across India, encroachment of public spaces is so widespread that it is not remarkable anymore - what is striking is the selective action taken in its name by the state. In Jahangirpuri, as in Khargone in Madhya Pradesh only days earlier, the timing was a dead giveaway. 'Illegal encroachment' has become the pretext for a BJP administration to target 'rioters' after the eruption of communal violence, who belong overwhelmingly to one community." The above extract is from the editorial ('The Encroachment', April 21) this newspaper published the day after the North Delhi Municipal Corporation despatched bulldozers to Jahangirpuri to demolish what it deemed to be illegal structures and encroachment. The editorial offers no defence of illegalities, encroachments or rioters. On the contrary, it is a plea for the rule of law. At the heart of rule of law, a cornerstone of constitutional democracy, is due process. In Jahangirpuri, the state ignored due process. The bulldozers were in action, even after the Supreme Court ordered that the demolitions be stopped, as part of a political agenda that reeked of retribution and communal hatred. The episode was eerily similar to the Turkman Gate demolitions during the Emergency though the scale of violence was far greater: The then Supreme Court was a mute spectator to the dismantling of civil rights, and there was no Brinda Karat to stand in front of the JCB as Indira Gandhi had locked up the entire Opposition. The editorial warns that "any attack on due process... goes to the fundamental promise that lies at the heart of a constitutional democracy - to protect lives and safeguard rights". "Due process", the editorial argues, "is not just what is written into the rule-book. It is inscribed in the everyday relations between institutions and citizens and government. It is what keeps them honest, and respectful of each other's freedoms and spaces." The Jahangirpuri demolitions were a continuation of the aggressive mobilisations that marked Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti earlier in the month. If Hindu right-wing groups were behind the mobilisations that triggered the violence on these festival days, the bulldozers signalled the intent of a partisan administration to punish who it considered to be the perpetrators of violence. That, Ashutosh Varshney argues, is a departure from the pattern visible in past riots ('The difference this time', April 23). He writes that though religious processions have a history of triggering riots, rarely have Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti been occasions that furthered the communal divide. But what he considers "infinitely more dangerous" is the state's response to these riots. Varshney writes: "In the past, processions might have caused riots, but the state rarely gave up the principle of neutrality in dealing with them." He further states: "Conceptually speaking, when a state either explicitly favours a community or looks away when a particular community is hounded, intimidated and attacked, it is no longer a riot, but a pogrom. Unleashing bulldozers on any given community without proper process is not simply illegal, it also qualifies as the beginning of a pogrom if the community is ethnically, religiously or racially defined." Pratap Bhanu Mehta ('With eyes wide open', April 21) writes that "it is a measure of our perversion as a society that Ram and Hanuman are now tropes to prepare the ideological groundwork for pogroms". He argues that majoritarian communalism in India has changed its character. It is neither instrumental in nature nor episodic or local. Mehta writes that "the orgies of hate and prejudice are not aberrations. They are now the norm. They are the norm because the highest levels of political authority, including the prime minister, by silences or dog whistles, condone it. They are the norm because elites openly spout it, without shame. They are the norm because being communal in some ways has become almost a necessary condition of political advancement and is fast becoming the default common sense of civil society". Mehta concludes his essay on a chilling note: "Almost all the preconditions for widespread pogrom-type violence are now in place in India. You almost dread the thought that India has reached a point where the question is not 'if' but 'when'." Balbir Punj ('Ignorance isn't bliss', April 21) traces the origins of hate and bigotry in today's India to 712, when Muhammad bin Qasim vanquished Sindh. In his reading, Hindu-Muslim relations were "seldom cordial". Punj writes: "Can laws or police fight hate? No. If they could, Kashmiri Hindus wouldn't have gone through the hell they did in the 1990s, and would have been happily back in their homes by now." He writes that the liberal intelligentsia "fights hate selectively". K P Shankaran ('Interrogating violence', April 23) writes on the roots of violence and blames the European idea of modernity. His anti-dote to state violence, which he claims is born out of the European ideas of nation-state, capitalism and parliamentary democracy, is the Gandhian vision of modernity. Gandhi, like the Buddha and Socrates, rooted his vision in ethics. Shankaran writes: "Once ethics takes over our orientation, we would become less selfish and our concerns would become other-centred instead of self-centred. With the shift of concern from the self to the other, through the cultivation of Satya, Ahimsa, Sarvodaya and aparigraha, Gandhi thought that our existential angst would disappear. Once that happens, Gandhi thought, we would be in a position to see the desirability of stateless communities in the world. He described such a world variously as Rama Raj/Khuda Raj, the kingdom of God on Earth. However, more often, he used the term 'Swaraj' to name such a political scenario." British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's India visit, though in the wake of the Ukraine war, was focussed more on bilateral relations, especially trade. The Indian Express editorial ('Living Bridges', April 23) says that "in the unfolding era of strategic convergence, the massive bridge between India and Britain is coming alive". C Raja Mohan ('A new shine to old ties', April 19) writes that "Delhi and London have begun a promising and pragmatic engagement devoid of sentiment and resentment". The Express editorial warns that the only outcome of Elton Musk's attempt to control Twitter by pitching himself as a champion of free speech would be "a concentration of power in his own hands". Bhaskar Chakravorti ('An arbiter of free speech', April 22) frames Musk in the context of his own past comments to conclude that Musk's bid for Twitter will only endanger free speech. Shahrukh Alam's article ('Difference as affront', April 22) reflects on the dangers that underlie the attempts to misrepresent diversity as a threat to unity and as emotional secessionism and the insistence to conform with a homogenous idea of culture. Shafey Kidwai on two centuries of Urdu journalism ('The Urdu public sphere', April 22), Shashi Tharoor and ED Mathew on the continuing relevance of the UN ('The pivotal player', April 19), Devesh Roy and Neelkanth Mishra ('India's wheat opportunity', April 21) on the global demand for Indian wheat in the backdrop of supply disruptions from Ukraine are among the interesting Op-Eds, you may want to read if you missed out during the week. Thank you, Amrith Lal The writer is a Senior Associate Editor with the Indian Express Opinion pages and writes on politics, public affairs and culture | 
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