Hindutva leader threatens Indian Muslims with bulldozers
Raghavendra Pratap Singh portrayed Muslims as habitual land grabbers and invoked demolitions, tactic increasingly associated with punitive action against Muslims
NEW DELHI, India (MNTV) — A senior leader of a Hindu extremist group has triggered outrage in India after publicly portraying Muslims as habitual land grabbers and threatening them with bulldozers, invoking a symbol that has become closely associated with the demolition of Muslim homes, businesses and religious properties.
Raghavendra Pratap Singh, the Uttar Pradesh state leader of a radical outfit Hindu Yuva Vahini, was filmed advocating the use of bulldozers against a madrasa, an Islamic religious school, while presenting Muslims collectively as people who seize and occupy land.
“Attacking, encroaching, and occupying is a habit of Muslims, but we also have the habit of destroying,” Singh says in the circulating footage. He follows the remark with an even more explicit formulation: “It is the habit of Muslims to encroach; it is our habit to demolish.”
The comments prompted condemnation on social media, where activists accused Singh of openly threatening an entire religious community and pointed to the political meaning that bulldozers have acquired under India’s Hindu nationalist governments.
Singh’s bulldozer threat carries a particularly charged meaning in India, where the machinery has become a symbol of Hindu nationalist punitive politics.
Authorities, particularly in BJP-ruled states, have repeatedly bulldozed Muslim homes, businesses and other properties following protests, communal violence or criminal accusations, often before any court determined guilt.
The practice became particularly prominent under Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk and hardline Hindu nationalist politician whose government promoted demolitions as a demonstration of its tough approach toward alleged offenders. Similar actions subsequently spread to other parts of India.
Rights groups have described such demolitions as punitive “bulldozer justice,” arguing that governments were bypassing courts and using alleged building violations to punish people before guilt had been established. Muslims have frequently been among those targeted.
India’s Supreme Court intervened in 2024, ruling that authorities cannot demolish a person’s property merely because they are accused or convicted of a crime and laying down nationwide procedural safeguards against arbitrary demolitions.
Against that history, Singh’s formulation of Muslims as people who “encroach” and Hindus as those who “demolish” turned the bulldozer into an explicit threat directed at a religious community rather than simply a reference to municipal enforcement.
Hindu Yuva Vahini was founded by Adityanath in 2002, years before he became chief minister of India’s most populous state.
The militant Hindutva organization has been associated with campaigns around cow protection, religious conversion and the so-called “love jihad” conspiracy theory, which falsely claims Muslim men systematically seek relationships with Hindu women to convert them to Islam.
The precise date and location where Singh delivered the latest remarks could not be independently established from the circulating footage.
The video surfaced amid renewed controversy over demolitions of Muslim institutions in Uttar Pradesh. Authorities recently demolished parts of a nearly six-decade-old madrasa and mosque in Pipra Ramlal village in Siddharthnagar district.
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