In August 2026, Parliament approved a new law, the Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, 2026, which equated Vande Mataram with the national anthem, the flag and the Constitution. The law makes wilful insult to the song and obstruction to its singing punishable by up to three years in jail. The government chose the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s composition for the song to announce the decision and argue that protecting Vande Mataram was an overdue correction. The Home Ministry statement accompanying the legislation said that, as a song that freedom fighters laid their lives to sing, it deserved the same protection as the national anthem. Such a remark asks us to believe that Vande Mataram was merely an artefact of the freedom struggle and, in the process, ignores the song’s theological claims and political trajectory, which are intertwined with the rise of Hindu nationalism.

, the 1882 novel in which Vande Mataram first appears, is more than a simple story of Hindu nationalism. It tells of a group of Hindu sanyasis who turn to violence when their Muslim rulers refuse to end a famine. Later printings of the novel made the antagonist less explicitly Muslim, but Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s original text was far more Islamophobic. The sanyasis’ uprising was not directed against the East India Company but another Muslim-ruled region that had taken over Bengal. In the novel, Vande Mataram is presented as a hymn to Durga, the ten-armed goddess who will destroy all her foes. The later stanzas were written in the same vein as Shakta goddess cults, where Kali and Durga are aspects of one divine entity. It is this very goddess worship that gives the poem its power and serves as its defining characteristic. This is why the song could not simply be adopted whole by a movement that sought to unite Hindus and Muslims in a common cause against England.

​Sri Aurobindo, who edited a nationalist paper called Bande Mataram between 1906 and 1910, subsequently wrote that he had experienced the presence of the Mother during his imprisonment and trial and that he had written a pamphlet, Bhawani Mandir, proposing the foundation of a monastery to the goddess as the centre of the nationalist movement. But instead of composing a novel and a collection of poems like Bankim, Aurobindo based his project on worship. The very language that was employed evoked the Vaishnava and Shakta traditions, creating a discourse that was devoid of muslim participation.

​The RSS’s conception of the nation as motherland, “Bharat Mata”, also draws on the same principle. The goddess here rides a lion, demanding devotion, not merely patriotism, from her children. It is perhaps fitting that the RSS has never sung Vande Mataram or even Jana Gana Mana, but “Namaste Sada Vatsale” instead. It is therefore ironic that the political heirs of the RSS are now criminalising people for singing Vande Mataram, which they have consistently eschewed for decades, employing its poetic and pictorial motifs as fuel for Hindu Rashtra.

​Rabindranath Tagore, who had set the poem to music and sung it before the 1896 Congress, realised the communal politics attached to it. When the Congress working committee addressed the issue in 1937, it did not prohibit the song or condemn it as inappropriate, even though it removed the allusions to Durga and Kali, retaining only the first two stanzas that describe the land in largely agrarian terms. The resolution adopted by the Constituent Assembly in 1950, which the bill under consideration now purports to follow, actually authorised only the truncated version. The 2026 bill quotes the Constituent Assembly's resolution of 1950 as giving the song "equal respect" with the anthem, which is correct, but does not mention that the song honoured was half the length of the one it replaced. In addition, government ministers speaking in the Assembly have gone beyond the text of the bill, arguing that the original shortening of the composition in 1937 was revenue measures designed to please Muhammad Ali Jinnah and that its restoration was an act of correction.

​Anti-nationalism, as a legal concept, describes conduct against the state: sedition, incitement, disruption. It has never described non-participation in a devotional recitation, and the Supreme Court settled the closely analogous question in the 1986 Bijoe Emmanuel case, when three Jehovah's Witness children were expelled from school for standing respectfully without singing the national anthem. The Court held that silent, respectful non-participation is not an offence, because the relevant law exists to punish disruption, not disagreement, and because the constitutional protection of conscience does not require a citizen to perform anything to prove loyalty. The term, in recent times, seems to have adopted a different practice altogether.

The Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, passed by Parliament that April and now known as the UMEED Act, abolished the doctrine of "waqf by user," under which a property could be recognised as a religious endowment on the strength of long, continuous use for that purpose, a mosque or graveyard that had functioned as one for generations without ever having a formal deed. Under the amendment, only a property with a written waqfnama qualifies going forward, and where a claim is disputed, the determination now rests with the government rather than the Waqf Board itself. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, works on the same logic from a different angle. It grants an expedited path to Indian citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians who arrived from Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Afghanistan before the end of 2014, on the premise of religious persecution, while leaving Muslims from those same countries outside the fast-track category altogether. The push toward a Uniform Civil Code follows the same instinct one step further. Personal law in India has long been plural by design: Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi, and various tribal and customary systems operating in parallel, each shaped by community practice rather than a single legislative text. A uniform code does not simply update these systems; it proposes replacing plurality itself with a single legible standard, on the argument that gender equality requires it, an argument that nonetheless produces the same structural result as the other two.

The real question, therefore, becomes much greater than the mere production of the right record of service by the Muslims. It rather asks whether it was ever going to count, at all. A movement that spent decades keeping this exact song at arm's length has now made it a criminal offence not to sing it.

 is pursuing a master's degree in English from Jamia Millia Islamia.

From Song to Law: The Politics behind Patriotism 

In a great deal of reporting about the barricades, the camera tower and the funnel entry points at Jantar Mantar, the containment has been presented as something that Delhi Police ‘improvised’ this time for this march. It has not been. Jantar Mantar is the only place where protest is officially allowed at all in central Delhi since 2018, when a Supreme Court judgment in the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan case, reopened it after the National Green Tribunal had prohibited all protest at the site on environmental grounds. That judgment’s bench, Justice A K Sikri and Justice Ashok Bhushan, declared that protests are a right. However, it simultaneously ruled that nobody could claim the right to hold a demonstration at a particular place, and asked Delhi Police to create a guideline that limits protest numbers and sets a minimum distance between Parliament House, the Supreme Court and high dignitary homes. The buffer zones that made this particular march from Jantar Mantar to Sansad Marg illegal without special permission are not a July 2026 creation; they have been prescribed by the judiciary itself eight years ago. The answer the judiciary gave when confronted with the query, can protest be banned entirely, was: no, but it can be compressed.This is what changes in the whole surveillance ramp-up. AI-aided command centre and 270 body cameras are merely the latest set of hardware on a long-established architecture. What needed a discussion and analysis was that, decades into its functioning as the state's sole designated protest space, why its architecture should remain as if any protest remotely approaching power should immediately become less legal the closer it came.

By four in the afternoon on July 20, the crowd that had assembled at Jantar Mantar for the "Chalo Sansad" march that had been pushed back towards Sansad Marg by Delhi Police and the Rapid Action Force. Lathis had come out in strength initially that turned violent soon after, as the crowds funneled into alleys. Tear gas shells had been fired at regular intervals. The traffic from Connaught Place to Barakhamba Road had been snarled for hours. Mobile internet had gone down in parts of central Delhi. One of the images that made the rounds on social media that afternoon was of Sheikh Irshad Mansuri, 25, his face pitted with pellet marks, outside the Lady Hardinge Medical College.

The footage of the Rapid Action Force personnel on the ground had been scrutinized by audio-visual experts who had identified the weapon as a pellet gun, which has a well-documented history of being employed on Kashmiri protesters. The CRPF has fired over 1.3 million pellets on Kashmiri protesters as of the summer of 2016, with hundreds of Kashmiri civilians, including children, permanently injured, and blindness being a common occurrence. Similar guns have been used by the CRPF in Manipur in 2023 and in the Shambhu border incident in 2024. The use of pellet guns, curfews, internet shutdowns, and mass arrests without due process have been the norm in Jammu and Kashmir for over a decade, and not as an issue that the country's Chief Justice might have to take notice of within a week.

Even when he does take notice, he goes on to tell counsel, “we are not interested in videos”. The irony writes itself – CJP’s own acronym is derived from a statement Surya Kant made from the bench in May likening unemployed youth to “cockroaches”, who turned to activism to “attack everyone”; and Surya Kant also sat on the 2019 bench that had made granting hearing to the Jamia students conditional upon assurances of “peace.” But the question that isn't being asked is what does a "mentioning" with no immediate date for hearing achieve for a court that would rather not decide the matter at all. Refusing to hear a matter urgently does not dismiss it, leaving it in a suspended state with neither the immediate direction for appeal that the government sought nor any findings for criticism by the judiciary, saving the court the effort of recording reasons while achieving the same result: a dismissal for lack of urgency.

December 15, 2019, same city, arguably more severe violence, and a country that barely reacted with the kind of unanimity on display in July 2026. Delhi Police stormed the campus of Jamia Millia Islamia, charging into the library and using batons and tear gas to disperse the students protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act, which would have made India's citizenship policy officially majoritarian. Sixty to eighty students were injured, and another fifty were arrested, with students recounting how they had to hide under the library benches as tear gas shells rained in. The Shaheen Bagh protests that followed were a hundred-and-one-day-long woman-led show of strength that received an outpouring of global support but inside India, the response was deeply fractured.

July 2026 looks like a dress rehearsal for the events of December 2019 in terms of politics if not in scale. A Union minister was able to meet with CJP spokespersons, having received a memorandum from them. Actors and members of Parliament dropped by to personally brief Wangchuk. The Leader of the Opposition received extensive and enthusiastic coverage for his arrest. This particular student movement did not have the misfortune to be associated in popular imagination with a larger anti-national Muslim threat, and its organizers were careful to distance themselves from the idea, replacing any chants of “Azadi” with the tricolor and Bharat Mata ki Jai as soon as they realized that Shaheen Bagh was not an option. That is a clever maneuver for a disorganized and ideologically diffused movement to pull off, and it is also an implicit admission that they do not think the country's institutions would respond to them as they responded to Shaheen Bagh, if they tried. Although CJP and activists were championing ‘the right to an education’, they have been unable to take a stance against the government seeking the demolition of Al Jauhar University, a minority institution. The same nationalist rhetoric proudly celebrated by the stage-managed patriotism can offer no platform to ‘the right to minority education’ if that means confronting India’s Hindu majoritarianism.

is pursuing her Master’s Degree in English from Jamia Millia Islamia

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this Publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of The Jamia Review or its members.

Confronting Hindu Majoritarianism: A Solidarity Too Costly For The CJP Politics 

The publication of Umar Khalid's doctoral thesis, Fractured Communities, by Juggernaut Books in June 2026, is a major political event in itself. The author is presently being detained in Tihar Jail without trial, more than six years into pre-trial detention under India's Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, and the book still makes its way through. Khalid's thesis advances a fractured argument that communities are essentially heterogeneous and can never be reduced to the unified blocs that power, colonial or majoritarian, requires them to be, drawing on archival research into the Adivasi communities of Singhbhum under British colonial rule. This article argues that the theoretical methodology underlying this finding strikes at the epistemological foundations of Hindutva. It also turns on the vocabulary of "Adivasi" itself, a term with its own origin, its own region, its own limits, which in turn disciplines the argument against Hindutva's “Vanvasi” project.

Thre is a tendency in liberal commentary on the BJP-RSS project to treat it as an ideology that can be opposed through ordinary political means of elections, coalitions, and civil society mobilization. In contrast, Hindutva functions less as a political program than as a claim about history, and the entire movement draws its momentum from that claim. It follows the classic argument of the existence of an ancient, continuous, and essentially unified Hindu civilization that constituted the authentic identity of the Indian subcontinent before it was successively violated by medieval Muslim conquest, British colonialism, and finally by a secular nationalist elite that denied Hindus the recovery to which history entitled them. Everything else follows from this fundamental thesis. The Citizenship Amendment Act functions as a historiographical act as much as an immigration statute, encoding into law the claim that India's authentic relationship with the world is defined by Hindu civilization’s boundaries. The Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram's decades-long work among Adivasi communities rests on more than a welfare rationale. It is founded on the claim that forest-dwelling tribal communities are originally Hindu people alienated from their civilisational roots by Christian missionary interference and requiring restoration to their authentic identity, a process the movement calls “Ghar Wapsi.” Hindutva, therefore, needs a historical grounding to produce its present, and that is precisely why it needed to capture the universities, and why 

 thesis, whatever else he may have said or done, was always going to translate itself into an issue for the State machinery.

The terminologies in question, “tribal,” “adivasi,” and “vanvasi,” indicate more than a vocabulary preference, as each term carries within it a theory of origin. "Tribe" is the oldest of the three, and it is a colonial administrative artifact before it is anything else. The colonial government needed a populace that could be taxed, settled according to land records, and governed by tribunals of customary law separate from regular courts.

"Adivasi" is most commonly understood, in this context of administrative flattening, as a self-designation, the meaning of which, “adi” (first) and “vasi” (inhabitant), contributes to the discourse on the evolution of the concept of Adivasi in a manner that gives primacy to indigenous people ahead of colonial imposition and ideology of Hindutva. This is not inaccurate but is slightly incomplete. The term originated in the specific political context of constitutional demand in the Chotanagpur region in 1938 by the Adivasi Mahasabha under Jaipal Singh Munda, campaigning for a separate province encompassing Chota Nagpur and the Santhal Parganas. It was never a pan-Indian self-designation waiting to be suppressed by Hindutva's "Vanvasi.” According to Virginius Xaxa, the notion of "Adivasi" has been used for a long time in many regions of eastern, northern, and southern India. Still, in the northeastern region, where the highest concentration of indigenous tribal peoples exists in the country, the term has not been applied. B.K. Roy Burman goes further, arguing "Adivasi" should be avoided altogether when discussing indigeneity outside its home ground, since using it there doesn't describe an existing self-identification; it imposes one.

This is precisely where "Vanvasi" comes in, purposefully refuting the Adivasi assertion in whatever region it targets. “Vanvasi” simply means forest-dweller (“van,” forest; “vasi,” inhabitant), which substitutes a temporal claim for a spatial one. Where "Adivasi," in the regions where it genuinely is a self-designation, asserts primacy (these are the first people), "Vanvasi" reduces that same group to a geographical coincidence of forest dwellers without any claims of precedence. Since they do not wish to acknowledge that these communities existed before other groups, members of the Sangh Parivar have used the term tribal over Adivasi. The term reintegrates them into the Hindu fold as a marginal population that needs to recuperate from the corrupting impact of conversion.

 is about the Adivasi communities of Singhbhum under British colonial rule, with the central argument that these communities were internally fractured. They differed in their social organization and were contingent in their responses to colonial power; therefore, they were irreducible to any cohesive bloc of "tribal" resistance or tribal identity. This internal complexity is thus suppressed by the homogenizing tendency of histories written from positions of power, which in turn produces a politically legible but historically false figure of the unified community.

Singhbhum sits inside Chota Nagpur and its adjoining tracts, the very region where "Adivasi" as self-designation genuinely does hold, where the Adivasi Mahasabha's own struggle originated in 1938, and where the term's political history is an indigenous invention against colonial and “dikus” (outsider) power rather than an imposition from outside the region. The essential RSS's Adivasi claim in this belt is that Adivasis are Vanvasis, forest-dwelling Hindus whose animist practices are continuous with Hinduism and who require recovery from the missionary taint. However, the ideological framework of "Ghar Wapsi" crumbles for the very groups it targets when that essence is removed, and archival evidence is used to show that what really occurred was fracture, contingency, internal difference, and negotiated adaptation to colonial power.

While Khalid demonstrates that Adivasi communities under colonial rule were distinct, contingent, and irreducible to a unified bloc, genealogical descent reveals that the very word used to name those communities is differentiated in its usage and contingent on a specific region. Whether that unity is imposed on a modern tribal population by a Hindutva cultural-recovery campaign, on a colonial-era community by a district collector's settlement record, or on the entire discursive field, they all reject the same unquestioned assumption of sameness between discrete units.

Kurmis have been categorized as Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Recently, however, the group has begun to assert their Sarna Hindu identity and is waiting to be categorized as a Scheduled Tribe in the upcoming census. Tribes such as the Munda, Oraon, and Santhal have strongly protested the move to categorize the Kurmis as Scheduled Tribes. Jharkhand has a 7.5 percent Scheduled Tribe population, which is already divided among 32-odd tribes. If the figure were to be divided further among more claimants, the same fixed quantum of seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes, forests reserved for their use, and government jobs would only get divided. Therefore, the struggle is taking place only within the four walls of the existing legal structure without relying on that insidious concept of ‘essence’ shared by the Munda, Oraon, and Santhal tribes and lacking in the Kurmis. This highlights the difference between the Vanvasi Hindutva move from above to dismantle the Adivasi category and merge it into the larger Hindu population and the already acquired legal category being fought and even fragmented among already established incumbent groups and the new claimants for limited resources, including quotas of seats, preserved forests, and government jobs, as well as their count in the censuses.

The Hindutva project has spent decades changing the past. This includes altering textbooks, renaming cities, and framing temple-mosque disputes as arguments for rightful ownership. Even efforts for tribal welfare have been recast as a recovery of civilization. The state claims that Khalid is a conspirator against the republic. They argue that his speeches led to mass violence and that he poses such a serious threat that six years of pre-trial detention without a verdict are warranted. The state's ability to define who truly participates in national life depends on a certain consistency. Labeling someone as "anti-national" means that credible institutions cannot view those identified as valuable contributors to national thought. This leads to a particular type of violence: silencing someone through noise rather than silence. Khalid has been labeled as a “terrorist,” “conspirator,” “mastermind,” and “anti-national,” which risks hiding the scholar behind these accusations. However, when a “terrorist” and an “accomplished doctoral scholar” turn out to be the same person, the state’s portrayal appears less like an accurate representation and more like a convenient tool. Publishing 

 thus becomes more than a book launch- it becomes an act of excavation.

Fractured Communities transcends Tihar

The Indian State legitimises the demolition drive through its discourse of legality. Here, however, the State takes up the role of a neutral judge. This article takes an entirely opposing stance and claims that the discourse of illegality is used as a technology of space production, which does not identify violations of the law but instead decides who gets to live in the ambivalent space created by the law. Muslim neighbourhoods in India have twice been made homeless: initially deprived of their structural capability of getting formal housing rights due to centuries of State indifference, discrimination, and violence, and ultimately demolished because of the informality that they were forced into. The bulldozer, in this reading, is not an instrument of urban governance but the final act in a longer drama of spatial exclusion whose earlier acts were carried out through indifference, discrimination, and the slow withdrawal of the State from areas it had already deemed expendable. Illegality here does not reveal itself; it is constructed and imposed.

A critical misunderstanding of urban informality is the belief that it exists as an entity external to the formal economy. The popular discourse around urban informality presents it as something external to the city, or as a residue of incomplete development. But if that were true, if the informal economy was truly external to the urban economy, its removal would have led to its collapse long ago. The thela-wala who parks his cart illegally outside the upscale market feeds the workers who stock its shelves. The dhobi who dries clothes on a patch of encroached land services the households of those who live in legally titled apartments. The construction worker who lives in a settlement with no legal tenure builds the city that later obliterates him from its memory. These are not marginal figures in the urban economy. They are, in fact, its load-bearing infrastructure.

It must be emphasised here that the State is very much aware of this phenomenon. Urban planners, urban labour offices, policies addressing informal economies- all of them acknowledge the structural significance of informal livelihoods. For decades, India’s erstwhile Planning Commission (now NITI Aayog) has recorded how informal economies dominate urban employment. It is not possible to govern a city without knowing where its marginal labour force lives. The State does not merely tolerate illegality in this sense; it licenses it through the gradual aggregation of permissions through non-enforcement. When the Delhi Development Authority “regularises” such colonies before an upcoming election, it is not extending mercy; it is codifying the truth that has always been operative- that legality cannot be possessed; it is a process that is accessed, along the lines of class, caste, and political patronage. Demolitions in India are also governed by predictable geographic and social criteria, regardless of how such operations attempt to be dispassionate exercises in urban governance. There are clear patterns to where and to whom the bulldozer comes. It arrives in economically disadvantaged areas, where residents are either Dalits or Muslims, and where the price of land has escalated due to proximity to infrastructure development or real estate investment. The bulldozer, therefore, functions not as the consequence of a legal process but as its substitute, as punishment administered through the idiom of urban planning.
The operation of demolition politics against Muslim minorities in India cannot be merely analysed through the political phenomenon of the bulldozers. Rather, one must trace its historical trajectory. The spatial condition characterised by the State as “illegal” is a result of decades of systematic state neglect and exclusion through communal violence. Ghettoes, therefore, did not appear but emerged over time by the same institutions that now use them as legal justification for erasure. The Sachar Committee Report of 2006 provided a review of the socioeconomic status of Muslims in independent India, which revealed that these localities received less infrastructural investment, and even banks were hesitant in granting loans because it was considerably “risky”. The riots that dot the pages of Indian urban history- Ahmedabad, Bhagalpur, Mumbai, Muzaffarnagar, and several other places that are no longer part of public memory- do not just destroy, they recreate. 

In the wake of violence, Muslim families tend to settle in neighbourhoods which are perceived to be relatively safer, meaning existing muslim-majority neighbourhoods. As the population density grows through time in a locality surrounded by fixed, and often unclear, legal boundaries, it acquires the spatial discourse of “unauthorised” space. The pattern that arises out of this history is an unbreakable cycle of deprivation and abuse. The State removes itself from any investments in infrastructure in Muslim-dominated areas. Communal violence drives them towards a higher concentration within those deprived regions. That high concentration results in illegal constructions, transactions, and an illegal arrangement of space, since anything legal is out of reach.

The double irony is inherent in the language of illegality, as it was designed precisely to obscure it. The first layer involves when Muslim areas are labelled as disorderly and disorganised spaces as per the classical lexicon of ghettos. Such descriptions have the effect of reinforcing the idea that these areas should be left without any governmental intervention, thus exacerbating the very problem being described. The second layer proves to be even more tragic since it is the very informal nature of this space, as created by the lack of governmental involvement, that leads to its demolition. The demographic is first labelled as illegality by a deliberate orchestration of neglect, and then punished for the illegality that neglect produced.

After the riots that occurred in Jahangirpuri (Delhi, 2022), Khargone (Madhya Pradesh, 2022), and various other places where communal disturbance took place, bulldozers arrived shortly to raze houses and shops in the area. Not to the houses of the people found guilty of instigating the riots, but those of Muslims living in the area, who had not come into notice until the riots. The demolition is not caused by the law but by the riot. The law simply acts as its language.
What this tells us is that the destruction of Muslim spaces operates not just as an exercise in the expulsion of bodies but as a statement, as an act, conducted in public and recorded on camera, which says that Muslim presence in the city is provisional, reversible, and ultimately subject to the benevolence of a state that has firmly positioned itself behind a majority political project.
It must be recognised here that the second spatial effect that it produces is the impact on Muslim communities that survive. For when Muslim homes are destroyed, through rioting or "anti-encroachment" measures, the surviving Muslim community is pushed closer into the pre-existing Muslim ghetto. The demolition does not disperse the ghetto; it reinforces it. At once reducing the spatial area in which Muslim existence is permitted, the demolition at the same time creates the necessary conditions for a future wave of "illegal structures," ripe for destruction in due course.

The most comprehensive recording of demolitions is evident from the one-year observation conducted by Frontline Magazine in 2024, where there were reports of forty-eight demolitions due to violations of housing laws in sixteen states and union territories, amounting to the razing of 7,407 homes and displacing approximately 41,085 individuals. Among these demolitions, almost 37% of them had been directed against Muslim properties and areas in particular, exceeding the number of Muslims residing in the urban areas of any of the mentioned states. Furthermore, it was concluded that one out of every four cases recorded by the study had been punitive in nature. The demolition process was undertaken not to undertake an urban plan but rather to punish Muslims who were allegedly responsible for communal incidents.


After violent episodes took place in the context of a Hanuman Jayanti processional event, bulldozers rolled into Jahangirpuri, a Muslim-dominated locality in Northwest Delhi, in April 2022. In response, the Supreme Court granted an injunction against demolition activities. But for the next hour, officials proceeded with the destruction of buildings, including the gate and staircases of a local mosque, until reaching the doorstep of a nearby temple, which stood some fifty metres away.
In Ahmedabad in 2024, municipal forces destroyed 8,500 homes in the Muslim-dominated locality of Danilimda as part of the drive to identify "illegal Bangladeshis." This use of illegal immigration as a secondary reason, superimposing a status of encroachment on the status of foreigner, constitutes a significant shift. It represents yet another element of illegibility layered onto a community living under a status of informality, the suggestion that these people are not just illegally occupying the city, but are also illegally present within it.
The demolitions of Chandola Lake houses in Ahmedabad in 2025, coming in the wake of the Pahalgam terror attack, similarly proceeded from the same assumption: the state referred to issues of national security and the presence of "illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators," thus conflating notions of informal housing, Muslim identity, and external threat into the same statement justifying the demolitions as both unavoidable and morally justified.


On May 24, 2026, bulldozers, escorted by the police and higher government functionaries, descended on the Sirsi region of Sambhal district to raze the Sher Ali Baba Peer mazaar – a local shrine – alongside an additional tomb-like structure. Government officials referred to the mazaar as an "illegal shrine constructed by individuals on government-owned property," indicating that "an attempt was made to lay a permanent claim over the region through construction of a small shrine." Such interpretation, where building a shrine by a certain group constitutes a territorial plot rather than an expression of faith, encapsulates the fundamental interpretive process at the heart of all demolition actions: Muslim territory practices, per se, constitute threats.

It was the state that built the ghetto. Today, it is photographing the process of its demolition and branding it as urban development. And here lies the peculiar brutality of the logic: the community will never win. If you move out of the locality, you erase your past. If you stay and build, you will be infringing on others. Large shrines will make you legally guilty. Small shrines will establish territorial claims. Laws are amended so that no matter what Muslims build, it will be illegal. Illegality does not come as an accidental condition in which these communities find themselves. It is being deliberately crafted for them through each bylaw, notice period and public interest litigation case. What is being demolished in such processes is not buildings and constructions alone. They are memories, the concrete expression of the community’s life within the city- the lanes in which children grew up, the shops constructed by their grandfathers, the mosques at which Eid prayers were held and funerals conducted, the shrines that transformed pieces of land from mere occupation to inhabitation. This is not an era of urban planning in India. It is an era of politics in which the rhetoric of the law is used to do that which, properly understood, the law forbids. The bulldozer is the tool. The encroachment notice, the excuse. And the communities that are being dispossessed of the land are not being done away with for their buildings. They are being done away with for who they are. There’s a name for this sort of thing, when practiced in a democracy: Communal Violence.



 is pursuing a master's degree in English from Jamia Millia Islamia.
Edited by:

Legality in a Liminal Light

How State-Sanctioned Campus Invasions in 2019 Paved the Way for Yati Narsinghanand's Demand to Destroy Educational Institutions- this article contends that educational spaces have been systematically transformed from protected zones of learning into legitimate targets of communal warfare, with Muslim universities now conceptualized as civilizational threats rather than academic institutions.

By summoning the Indian Army to blow up four Muslim universities with cannons, 

 was not delivering another inflammatory speech; the guru of 

was pointing to an ominous shift in the communal politics of India: the shift of university campuses into ideological battlegrounds where universities themselves now transform into targets for wider cultural war.

His pronouncement, “Terrorist dens like 

Al-Falah University, AMU, Jamia Millia, Darul Uloom Deoband 

should be blown up with cannons by sending in the army”, comes at a time when universities in India are being increasingly reconfigured as a source of threat to national security, religious identity and social order. It is a much more dangerous type of rhetorical transformation than individual hate speech: it marks the normalization of targeting universities in propaganda campaigns of religious character.

The university campus has become, perhaps, the most controversial ideological place in modern India, carefully re-packaging intellectual discourse and academic freedom in a communal flavour, whereby Muslim schools are no longer seen as a source of learning but as a breeding-ground of extremism, disloyalty, and anti-nationalism.

The catalyst for Narsinghanand’s comment was the explosion at 

 causing the death of at least 15 people. Caused by ammonium nitrate fuel oil in a vehicle, the explosion has been formally labeled a "terrorist attack " and investigations suggest that some suspects have connections, to Al-Falah University including the purported suicide bomber. Extensive operations have been conducted by the National Investigation Agency and Enforcement Directorate with a minimum of 200 doctors and personnel currently being examined.

Nevertheless his reaction was not limited to Al-Falah, subject to an active criminal probe. He extended his remark to three universities, which were entirely unrelated to the attack: AMU, Jamia and Darul Uloom Deoband. This broadening reveals the reasoning behind the actions, which is less about targeting specific criminal deeds and more about holding an entire community collectively responsible, via its educational institutions. When universities are successfully established as being “terrorist dens”, violence against them becomes not merely admissible but unavoidable.

To examine how we arrived at this juncture, we need to trace the history of the process of targeting universities, and 

marks a defining break. The protests of the Citizenship Amendment Act demonstrated that muslim universities were not merely targets of rhetoric, but also State invasion, with scant surveillance, transforming them into de facto conflict zones.

, hundreds of police officers raged into the JMI campus without authorization, deploying batons and tear gas on students inside the library and washrooms, with images of students being dragged and beaten were aired on news television. However, the violence at Aligarh Muslim University seems to have been even more communalistic in nature. A fact-finding report revealed that police shot stun grenades "usually used in war-like situations or terror operations" at students and had brazenly raised such chilling slogans as “Jai Shri Ram”.

When Narsinghanand now appeals for military strikes on these universities, he is tapping into the reservoir of state violence and communal discrimination that has been filling up for years. The 

 Haridwar Dharam Sansad that he organized, included at least two speakers who called for genocide against Muslims- a development protested by 76 senior lawyers and judges and retired military leaders on grounds of national security. He was arrested in 

 but granted bail and resumed incendiary speeches. His derogatory comments about Prophet Muhammad in 

sparked demonstrations across cities leading to the filing of multiple FIRs afterward.

What makes his focus on universities striking is the fact that it echoes a wider narrative, one pitting civilizations against each other. Under this context, universities do more than educate students; they perpetuate identity and consequently civilizational difference. The representation, therefore implies that Muslim universities are not merely producing citizens but prospective enemies.

This is the reason his claim affiliates Al-Falah, now under scrutiny, with AMU, Jamia and Deoband none of which have any accusations, labeled as "terrorist dens" not based on proof but because of what they symbolize: the continuation of Muslim identity, via education.

When a spiritual leader is able to demand the military to shell universities- not figuratively but literally, using artillery- and does not endure significant penalties, it indicates that the theoretical barrier between political speech and acts of violence toward academic establishments has been transcended. The fact that such assertions are being openly voiced, documented and shared implies an assurance that no serious retribution will result.

A question now faces India: whether educational institutions can be reclaimed as spaces fundamentally separate from communal politics or will continue to be proxies in a larger civilizational conflict. Narsinghanand's statement, and the relative impunity with which he makes it, suggests the latter scenario is becoming normalized.

Articles by Ateerah Ahmed

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