The Bulldozer and the Microphone

Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan

Courts have outlawed punitive demolitions and hate speech keeps rising anyway. A fact-check of a widely shared video, set against the data

A video circulating in Hindi on social media, attributed to a speaker identified as “Irfan bhai,” makes a forceful argument: that demolitions of property in India disproportionately hit Muslims, that hate speech is concentrated in states run by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and that both have intensified around elections and after the terrorist attack in Pahalgam in April 2025. This report checks those claims against independent reporting, court records and the datasets the video appears to draw on, then sets out the broader picture and the principal objections to it.

The headline finding: most of the discrete factual claims in the video correspond closely to figures published in named, citable reports — chiefly by India Hate Lab (IHL), a project of the Washington-based Centre for the Study of Organised Hate (CSOH), and by the Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR) with the Quill Foundation. One claim is overstated: the assertion that demolition victims are Muslim “without exception” is not supported by the broader demolitions data, which shows a large but partial skew. The figures themselves, meanwhile, are contested by BJP-aligned commentators, who argue the source organisations are methodologically one-sided. Both the data and the dispute over the data are part of the story.

1. “Bulldozer justice”: what the court actually said

The claim checks out, with the date right. On 13 November 2024, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India, in In Re: Directions in the Matter of Demolition of Structures, ruled that demolishing a person's home or business purely because they stood accused of a crime is unconstitutional. The judgment held that the executive cannot act as judge, and ordered that no demolition could proceed without 15 days' written notice, an opportunity to be heard, a reasoned order, and a video record of the demolition itself — with non-compliance to be treated as contempt of court.

The court's own language was unusually blunt: it said the practice was “unknown to any civilised society” and that officials should not be in a hurry to see “women, children and aged persons dragged to the streets overnight.”

But the ruling has not stopped the practice

Reporting since November 2024 has documented repeated, well-attested violations: a mosque partly demolished in Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh, in defiance of the order (the Supreme Court issued contempt notices over it); demolition notices served on Muslim households, a mosque and a cemetery in Beawar, Rajasthan, tied to allegations of “love jihad”; and a Rs 6 million compensation order in April 2025 after the court found Prayagraj's development authority had illegally demolished six families' homes in 2021 with no due process — a case in which Justice Abhay Oka said the demolitions “shocked the conscience of the Court.”

The one overstatement: “every single case”

The video's claim that demolition victims are Muslim “without exception” goes further than the documented record. An investigation by Frontline, cited in subsequent reporting, found that of demolitions in 2024 with adequate documentation, 55% involved marginalised communities broadly and 37% specifically targeted Muslim-owned property — a heavy and disproportionate skew (Muslims are roughly 14% of India's population) but not the totality the video describes. Separately, a 2023 study found roughly 740,000 people were displaced by state-driven demolitions nationwide between January 2022 and December 2023, a figure that spans many causes beyond communal targeting, including slum clearance and infrastructure projects.

2. Hate speech: the numbers behind the claim

This is the best-documented part of the video, and the figures match published reports closely. India Hate Lab's annual reports, compiled by the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate, recorded 668 verified in-person hate-speech events targeting religious minorities in 2023, 1,165 in 2024 (a 74% rise) and 1,318 in 2025 (a further 13% rise) — an average of four events a day across the most recent year.

Verified in-person hate-speech events targeting religious minorities in India, 2023–2025. Source: India Hate Lab / CSOH.

Of 2025's 1,318 events, 98% targeted Muslims (explicitly or alongside Christians) and 88% occurred in states governed by the BJP or its allies — up from roughly 80% in 2024 — matching the video's figures almost exactly. The report names six of the ten most frequent individual speakers as senior BJP figures or BJP-aligned politicians, including Home Minister Amit Shah, Uttarakhand's chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, and Uttar Pradesh's chief minister Yogi Adityanath, alongside Hindu nationalist organisers such as the Antarrashtriya Hindu Parishad's Pravin Togadia — again consistent with the video's “six of the top ten” claim.

The video's claim about the 16 days after the Pahalgam attack is precise: IHL recorded 98 in-person hate-speech events between 22 April and 7 May 2025, in the window between the attack and the subsequent India–Pakistan military exchange. April 2025 was the single highest month on record, with 158 events, overlapping with Ram Navami processions.

3. The aggregate toll: 947, 13%, 25

These three figures come from a separate dataset — not IHL's hate-speech count, but a joint hate-crime and hate-speech tracker published by APCR and the Quill Foundation, covering 7 June 2024 to 7 June 2025, the first year of the BJP's third term under Narendra Modi. It documented 947 incidents in total: 602 classified as hate crimes and 345 as hate speeches.

Hate crimes and hate speeches documented in India, June 2024–June 2025. Source: APCR / Quill Foundation.

Of the 602 hate crimes, 173 involved physical violence and 25 resulted in deaths — all 25 of them Muslim victims, according to the report. Only 13% of the 602 hate crimes led to a formal police complaint (an FIR), which the report's authors describe as evidence of a systemic failure to prosecute. Thirty-two of the documented incidents targeted minors. The figures in the video — 947 incidents, 13% FIR rate, 25 deaths, and an average of four hate-speech events a day — all correspond to figures in the public record, though they are drawn from two different organisations' reports rather than one.

4. The named incidents

Two specific deaths cited in the video are independently verifiable. Arish Khan (the video's “Aarish Khan”), a 17-year-old Muslim student in Fatehpur, Uttar Pradesh, was ambushed and beaten with rods by three named assailants moments after leaving school on 23 July 2025; he died of his injuries on 26 July. Supporters of the accused reportedly celebrated the killing online, and APCR offered the family legal support. The case is widely described in Indian press as a suspected hate crime, though as of this writing no court has returned a verdict.

A seven-year-old Muslim boy in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, was abducted and killed in September 2025; police treated the case as a hate crime, and it drew condemnation from religious and political figures, including a Congress leader who described the killing on social media in graphic terms. As with the Fatehpur case, the criminal investigation was ongoing as the most recent reporting was published.

5. The other side of the ledger

None of this data is uncontested, and a full account has to include the pushback. BJP-aligned commentators and outlets have challenged IHL/CSOH's methodology on several grounds: that the organisation relies partly on Hindutva Watch, a tracker its critics call partisan; that categorising terms like “love jihad” as a baseless conspiracy theory forecloses examination of the underlying police cases that do exist (one tracker cited by critics counts several hundred such cases in 2025 alone, based on FIRs and complaints); and that classifying religious commemorations such as Shaurya Diwas, marking the 1992 Babri demolition, as “hate speech” conflates a long-litigated historical dispute with incitement. A 2024 commentary went further, calling an earlier IHL report “propaganda” and disputing its causal claims about BJP responsibility.

The BJP itself has not issued a detailed point-by-point rebuttal of the 2025 IHL report; it has previously denied discriminating against minorities and describes its policies as inclusive. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP's ideological parent body, has responded to the broader pattern of international criticism by sending senior figures, including general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale, on outreach visits to Western policy circles to contest the characterisation of the organisation as responsible for anti-minority violence.

It is also true that India's Supreme Court, having intervened forcefully on demolitions in late 2024, pulled back from a comparably active role on hate speech in 2025: in November of that year a bench said it was “not inclined to monitor every incident of hate speech” nationally, directing complainants to high courts and local police instead — even as a separate bench held, in a case involving comedians, that hate speech could not be defended as a fundamental right.

Verdict

Claim	Rating	Basis
Nov. 2024 SC ruling banning “bulldozer justice,” 15-day notice mandatory	Accurate	Confirmed: In Re: Directions … Demolition of Structures, 13 Nov 2024
Every demolition victim is Muslim, no exceptions	Overstated	Frontline data: 37% of 2024 demolitions targeted Muslims specifically; 55% hit marginalised groups broadly — a large skew, not a totality
88% of hate speech in BJP-ruled states; 6 of top 10 speakers are BJP figures	Accurate	India Hate Lab / CSOH, 2025 annual report
98 hate-speech events in 16 days after Pahalgam	Accurate	India Hate Lab / CSOH, 22 Apr–7 May 2025 window
947 incidents, 13% FIR rate, 25 deaths	Accurate	APCR / Quill Foundation, June 2024–June 2025 (a different dataset than the hate-speech figures above)
Arish Khan (17) and a 7-year-old boy killed in hate-motivated attacks	Accurate	Independently reported by multiple Indian outlets; police treating both as suspected hate crimes; prosecutions ongoing

Overall: the great majority of the video's specific figures are traceable to named, publicly available reports and check out as stated. The principal caveats are that two different datasets are blended without attribution in the original video, one claim (demolitions “without exception”) overstates a real but partial pattern, and the underlying source organisations face serious, organised disputes over their methodology and framing from BJP-aligned critics — disputes this report has summarised rather than adjudicated.

Sources

—      Supreme Court of India, In Re: Directions in the Matter of Demolition of Structures, judgment of 13 November 2024.

—      India Hate Lab / Centre for the Study of Organised Hate, “Hate Speech Events in India,” annual reports for 2023, 2024 and 2025 (published Feb. 2024, Feb. 2025 and Jan. 2026).

—      Association for Protection of Civil Rights and Quill Foundation, “Hate Crime Report: Mapping First Year of Modi's Third Government,” June 2025.

—      Frontline magazine, demolitions data analysis, cited in Maktoob Media, “Despite Supreme Court verdict, ‘bulldozer justice’ continues,” March 2025.

—      Maktoob Media, The Wire, The South First, the News Minute, CJP, Newsgram, Siasat and IndiaTomorrow: contemporaneous news coverage of named incidents and report releases, 2025–2026.

—      The Commune and IBG News: published critiques disputing IHL/CSOH methodology, cited for balance.

—      Oxford Human Rights Hub and the Tribune (India): legal analysis of post-ruling compliance and contempt proceedings.