NEW DELHI - In the northern Indian city of Haldwani, about 4,000 families faced homelessness in December after the High Court of the state, Uttarakhand, ordered their eviction from land claimed by the Indian Railways, according to Aljazeera.

Most of the families are Muslim, and everything — homes, schools and mosques — was to be demolished. The story rightly made international headlines, and eventually, the country’s Supreme Court put a hold on the eviction for now, arguing that authorities needed to come up with a resettlement and rehabilitation plan first.

Yet the incident in Haldwani, 296km (184 miles) from national capital New Delhi, captures a broader pattern of injustice masquerading as law and order that’s playing out across India under the majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules federally and in most states. The bulldozer is central to this strategy.

Muslims are the target. And unlike in Haldwani, affected people and communities only rarely get even a temporary reprieve. Nowhere is this more evident than in the northeastern state of Assam, some 2,000km (1,242 miles) away from New Delhi, where the BJP has ruled since 2016.

Thousands of Muslim families have been forcibly evicted since 2021 from land they had been residing on for decades. Since 2016, police have shot at and killed protesters in at least two instances.