In April 2025, a parade of 50 bulldozers carried out a forced demolition of 2,000 homes, referred to as “encroachments”, around Chandola Lake, in Ahmedabad, India. Bangali Vas wasn’t the first poor Muslim community to be reduced to rubble, and critics have questioned the legality and morality of such forced demolitions which reflect a move in India to target Muslims, with many labelled “Bangladeshi” despite being Indian citizens. Based on a web of news reports, this story highlights the people at the heart of these communities.
Balsher Singh Tiwana is the winner of the University of Warwick’s 2025-26 annual Lacuna Writing Competition, organised by the Centre for Human Rights in Practice. This is his winning article which he reworked with Lacuna Magazine.
The blue door stood quietly that morning, unaware of what the day would demand of it.
Before the demolitions, it opened to a life held together by small routines and quiet dignity. Every dawn, Hapizabanu swept the courtyard outside it, shaking loose last night’s dust while the smell of wet earth drifted in from Chandola Lake.
Children carrying schoolbags raced past her lane, their laughter rising above the soft hum of prayer from nearby homes.
Inside, the room was small, but every corner carried meaning. There was a brass plate from her mother, her daughter’s broken comb, and the television she had saved for months to buy.
Women gathered on the steps in the evening heat, trading stories about illness, marriages and the stubbornness of life. There was nothing remarkable about the blue door itself, yet behind it, years and stories had been stitched into the walls.
Illustration of the “blue door,” a symbol of the community around Chandola Lake, in Ahmedabad, India.
No one imagined that a home, built piece-by-piece, could be undone in the time it takes for a machine to move forward once.
Hapizabanu Begum was not a public figure, nor an activist. She was not someone accustomed to being listened to.
She was a migrant worker from West Bengal who lived for years in Bangali Vas, a settlement near Chandola Lake in Ahmedabad.
Like many of her neighbours, Hapizabanu had built her life slowly, through daily labour, borrowed wages, second-hand possessions, and the quiet determination to build something permanent on uncertain ground.
Communities like Bangali Vas are often reduced to the language of illegality. They are called “encroachments”, “hutments”, “unauthorized structures”.
But such words flatten reality.
These are neighbourhoods assembled over years by people with little money and fewer choices – domestic workers, drivers, ragpickers, vendors, labourers.
Children are born there. Families grow there. Futures are imagined there. In these places where the state refuses to see permanence, life insists on creating it.
The blue door shook when the bulldozers arrived.
At first the sound was strange, a low rumble rising through the ground. Then came the shouting, the pounding of boots, the metallic growl of engines swallowing every familiar sound of the neighbourhood.
Dust rose long before Hapizabanu understood what was happening. Police filled the lane, their voices sharp and hurried.
A row of yellow excavators stood facing the homes of Bangali Vas, their raised arms poised like weapons waiting for command.
Someone screamed. Someone ran. Someone lost grip of a child.
The day blurred in her memory. It may have been the twenty-eighth or the twenty-ninth of April, but time held no meaning once the destruction began.
Hapizabanu held the blue doorframe as the first house gave way. Bricks collapsed like brittle shells and the roofs folded inward. The warning had spread hurriedly through the community before the demolition began. Not enough time to save a home. Not enough time to gather a life.
Four days earlier, an attack in Pahalgam had shaken the country. In its aftermath, a security crackdown spread far beyond Kashmir.
In Gujarat, it took the form of raids targeting those suspected of being “illegal Bangladeshis”. Around Chandola Lake, police moved through Muslim neighbourhoods before dawn, detaining hundreds for verification.
By the next morning, families were standing in a line that reportedly stretched for nearly four kilometres. Women held infants. Old men leaned on sticks. Children cried in the rising heat.
People who said they had lived their whole lives in India were suddenly made to prove that they belonged to the only place they had ever known.
Nearly 900 people were detained in Ahmedabad alone, according to reports. Other accounts put the number higher. The figures changed. The fear remained.
For the residents of Bangali Vas, the line between national security and neighbourhood punishment was impossible to ignore. First came suspicion. Then came demolition.
Officially, the operation was described as an anti-encroachment drive. Authorities said the homes around Chandola Lake were illegal structures built on public land, and that the clearance had been “carried out legally”.
That language matters because it is the language through which homes are stripped of their intimacy and humanity. A kitchen becomes an obstruction. A courtyard becomes an encroachment. A life becomes a file.
But for Hapizabanu and her neighbours, the demolitions did not feel administrative. They felt punitive.
And when the bulldozer reached her home, the blue door fell from its hinges. It landed heavily in the dust, as if it understood that some blows are meant to silence.
The demolitions at Chandola Lake did not occur in isolation. In recent years, bulldozers have become one of the most visible symbols of state authority in India.
Demolitions across India have shed light on the disproportionate attacks on the Muslim community, under the guise of merely “clearing illegal structures.”
After communal unrest, protests, criminal allegations, or security scares, homes and shops are sometimes flattened in operations described by authorities as ‘routine enforcement’ but described by critics as something else: bulldozer justice.
That phrase is controversial, but it has entered public life for a reason.
Human rights groups, lawyers and journalists have increasingly warned that demolitions are being used not only to clear land, but to send a message. The message is rarely delivered equally.
Again and again, it falls on the poor, on informal settlements, on those whose citizenship is doubted most quickly, and on those whose names, languages, clothing or prayer habits make them easier to cast as suspect. Muslim communities have borne a disproportionate share of that burden.
The United Nations’ human rights experts have warned that arbitrary and punitive demolitions targeting minorities and marginalised communities violate housing rights and due process.
They have also warned against the use of “national security” and “foreign nationality” as pretexts for forced evictions without legal safeguards. Their language is much more careful than the reality it describes.
The legal picture is not simple. Authorities insist they are clearing illegal structures, not targeting communities. Courts have at times accepted official claims about encroachment on public land and unauthorized settlement. Sceptical readers may ask whether the homes near Chandola Lake were lawful. And that question matters.
But another question matters too.
What does legality mean when it arrives with mass destruction, insufficient notice, and thousands of already marginalised people left on the street? What does due process mean to someone who returns to find her home reduced to dust? And what kind of justice destroys schoolbooks, medicines, cooking utensils and children’s uniforms in the name of order?
The blue door exists now only in memory.
For weeks after the demolition, Hapizabanu lived beneath a tarpaulin sheet pulled tight against the rain. When the clouds burst, the ground below her turned cold and muddy, and she curled her knees to her chest to stay warm.
On nights of heavy rain, some families climbed into parked autorickshaws, grateful for even a borrowed roof.
Schoolbags no longer swung from children’s shoulders. Their uniforms remained buried under the rubble.
Some children stopped going to school altogether. Some began helping at tea stalls. Others simply watched the road, as if waiting for a version of life that would not return.
Families borrowed money simply to eat. Women walked further each day offering to scrub floors or wash utensils in homes far from where their own once stood. What had already been precarious became almost impossible.
Then came the promise of rehabilitation.
Forms to apply for government-assisted housing were distributed. There were thousands of them, residents said, but not enough for everyone.
Each required money to submit. Each required documents. Each seemed to ask people who had just lost everything to prove, in duplicate, that they had once possessed something worth losing.
For families already sleeping under plastic sheets, 7,500 rupees was not just a form fee. It was a brick wall.
Some folded the forms and placed them beneath their pillows. Not out of hope exactly, but because hope, too, is hard to throw away when you have so little left.
Every night, as the tarpaulin rustled in the wind, Hapizabanu wondered about punishment. If the state believed it had to punish, why punish walls? Why punish schoolbooks? Why punish refrigerators bought after months of saving? Why punish entire lanes where no crime had been committed?
That question hovers over Chandola Lake, but it reaches much further than one settlement in Ahmedabad.
The deeper issue is the ease with which some lives become removable. It is how quickly a terror attack in one part of the country can be made to travel into the homes of people who had nothing to do with it.
In neighbourhoods like Bangali Vas, fear does not always arrive loudly. Sometimes it arrives as a rumour. Sometimes as a line outside a police compound. Sometimes as a machine reversing into position. Sometimes as the knowledge that one accusation, one shift in national mood, one speech about security or infiltration, can turn a settled life into debris by sunrise.
A bulldozer delivers this message.
Yet even in the midst of broken bricks and unanswered questions, life continues. A woman ties a rope between two shattered pillars and hangs damp clothes to dry. A man lights a small stove made from two stones and boils tea. Children still play around the rubble because children, unlike governments, do not know how to stop imagining a future.
A little girl draws her old home in the mud, complete with a small blue door.
And one morning, as the first light rises over the dust, Hapizabanu lifts the corner of her tarpaulin. The world around her is unrecognisable, a place where homes can be flattened in minutes and identities can be doubted without reason. Still, she stands there, letting the sunlight warm her face.
A home can be shattered at sunrise.
But a person, it seems, takes much longer to break.
All artwork by Lacuna artist Wong Yan Yee.
Read more: 9 human rights stories from the Lacuna Writing Competition
