'SC parked bulldozer in garage forever': Oppn leaders hail top court verdict

New Delhi: With the Supreme Court applying brakes on bulldozer action, opposition leaders on Wednesday hailed the judgement and took a swipe at the BJP, saying the apex court has “parked the bulldozer in the garage forever”.

Equating ‘bulldozer justice’ with a lawless state of affairs where might is right, the apex court laid down pan-India guidelines and said no property should be demolished without a prior show cause notice and the affected must be given 15 days to respond.

The executive cannot assume judicial powers to punish citizens by demolishing their properties without following due process, the top court said while terming such excesses “high-handed and arbitrary” and ruling that they need to be dealt with the “heavy hand of the law”.

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Opposition parties in Uttar Pradesh hoped that with this verdict, the “bulldozer terror” and “jungle raj” in the state would end.

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said the Supreme Court has “parked the bulldozer in the garage forever”, remarks that were seen as a dig at the Yogi Adityanath government.

Addressing a gathering in Kanpur ahead of the November 20 bypolls, Yadav claimed that the houses of the poor were being demolished in the name of bulldozer action.

He claimed that the manner in which bulldozers were used in Ayodhya was the reason behind the defeat of the BJP in the Lok Sabha election.

Taking a jibe at the ruling BJP over the top court verdict, he said, “With the Supreme Court’s decision, the bulldozer has been parked in the garage forever. There can be no bigger comment than what the Supreme Court said.”

Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati took to X to welcome the verdict and said, “After today’s decision of the Hon’ble Supreme Court regarding demolitions and the related strict guidelines, it should be expected that UP and other state governments will manage public interest and welfare properly and the terror of bulldozer will definitely end now.”

Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Ajay Rai said the verdict would end the “jungle raj” in the state while the Samajwadi Party said that “bulldozer action” was “totally unjust, unfair, unconstitutional and illegal”.

Meanwhile, the Uttar Pradesh government, which has been receiving flak from various quarters over bulldozer action, also hailed the Supreme Court’s verdict on the matter and said it will help curb organised crime and instil a fear of legal consequences among criminals.

Congress leader and Supreme Court lawyer Vivek Tankha welcomed the verdict, saying that it is a historical day for India and a historic judgment as far as civil liberties are concerned.

“Supreme Court has thrashed the state for this ‘Bulldozer Raaj’ or ‘Bulldozer justice’. The way state governments were behaving with arrogance, it looked very uneducated and as if they would use it as a political tool. All this has stopped now, there can be no ‘Bulldozer Raaj’ now. If you want to demolish anybody’s house, you have to give them a notice and a minimum of 15 days time,” he said.

There will be a hearing and there will be an order that is challengeable in law, he added.

“So, now the Supreme Court has also opened the gates for the prosecution of all those people who committed such illegality in the past, be it in any state of India,” Tankha said.

Congress MP Imran Pratapgarhi said the Supreme Court’s observations on “bulldozer justice” have shown the mirror to BJP-ruled states, emphasising the supremacy of the Constitution.

AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi welcomed the Supreme Court’s directions on ‘bulldozer justice’ and claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier had celebrated “bulldozer raj”, which the SC called “a lawless state of affairs”.

“The #Bulldozer judgement of the Supreme Court is a welcome relief. The most important part of it is not in its eloquence, but the enforceable guidelines. Hopefully they will prevent state governments from collectively punishing Muslims & other marginalised groups,” the Hyderabad MP said in a post on ‘X’.

AAP leader Sanjay Singh also hailed the verdict, saying the country’s law and order, Constitution, democracy cannot be run by “bulldozer raj”.

“I believe that Supreme Court verdict will strengthen people’s faith in the Constitution,” he said.

CPI(M) leader Brinda Karat also welcomed the top court’s verdict and said she wished it would have come earlier.

“I welcome the Supreme Court judgment holding bulldozer actions as being illegal and malafide. I only wish the judgment had come earlier as it would have saved the bulldozing of many many houses across BJP-led states,” Karat said in a statement.

“But it has come, it has brought justice to those who suffered and to those who would have suffered in the future because of the BJP’s targeting of the poor and particularly of minority communities,” she said.

A bench of Justices B R Gavai and K V Viswanathan described as “chilling” the sight of a bulldozer demolishing a building, rendering women, children and aged persons homeless overnight.

“If the executive acts as a judge and inflicts penalty of demolition on a citizen on the ground that he is an accused, it violates the principle of ‘separation of powers’,” the bench said in its 95-page judgment.

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