A boy sits amid the rubble of his home that was demolished last year in Sunder Nagar, near Nizamuddin basti. (Express Photo by Tashi Tobgyal)
A recent report in The Indian Express showed that losing homes to “demolition drives” is an election issue for the victims in the ongoing polls. A report by Housing and Land Rights Network also revealed that governments in India, through forced evictions, demolished 46,371 houses in 2022. This figure more than doubled in 2023 with 1,07,449 demolished houses. An Amnesty International Report also documented how house demolitions are being used as a way of inflicting suffering on minorities and dissidents in India. At this point, it is important to understand that the word “demolition” is not enough to convey the meaning of losing a house to violent destruction. We must call it domicide instead.
Demolition, the good, the bad
Demolition can be both constructive and destructive. One might demolish an old house to build a better and more aspirational house, people demolish walls in their homes to make larger rooms or open courtyards up to air and sunlight, the Berlin Wall was demolished as a form of liberation and reunification for families and lovers, and Hitler’s bunker was demolished to erase any material embodiment of his memory. Demolition can be a need for a better and more egalitarian future, a force for happiness, betterment, and a realm of possibility to build anew.
Demolition can also be destructive but due to its vague and fluid meanings, the word limits our understanding of the act of destroying someone’s home. Moreover, demolition’s constructive meanings often hide or are used as proxies for its destructive onslaught. Slums are often demolished to make way for development projects advertising a possibility that the demolition will enable. Demolition is also often presented as a necessity to “clean” the city and its public spaces, and can, therefore, be enacted in a language of public good. Indian municipalities still use the term “sanitation drive”, for example, while bulldozing slums. Many poor and powerless street vendors and homeless people suffer in this narrative.
Domicide v demolition
Domicide, on the other hand, is the killing of home. A home is a living breathing ecosystem. It is built of memories, snippets of life’s milestones, and social interactions. Home is a promise of safety, a necessity for dignity and a matter of pride. Home is the place for a family to live and build a future, to aspire and dream, to enjoy seasons and be safe from them, to celebrate festivals, to rejoice in achievements and to mourn and grieve in loss. Home is where quality of life is experienced, and the trauma of existence is negotiated. Home enables opportunity. It is where kids study after school and parents rest after a hard day of labour, where hard work and growth manifest as a new room, a better roof, or a fresh coat of paint. Home is the basis of identity, a requirement for state welfare, and even a qualifier to be counted by the state. Home is a place to exercise rights, to engage with others in privacy and dignity, the last bastion against societal stigma, and the last space where the right to privacy can materialise. Home, therefore, is alive and hence, home is not demolished. Home is killed.
The word domicide, coined by J Douglas Porteous and Sandra E Smith, is made up of two Latin words — domus (home) and caedere (to kill). Just like genocide means killing a people and suicide means killing the self, domicide means killing the home. Porteous and Smith define domicide as the deliberate destruction of the home that causes suffering to its inhabitants. Since the architecture of the home is inseparable from the life it shelters, domicide is not just the destruction of an architectural object but also the displacement of life and infliction of suffering. By destroying the object and space that ties dignity, memory, social life, and identity with the inhabitant, domicide kills the home and its multidimensional all-encompassing meaning. Most importantly, while demolition can be voluntary, domicide is forced and is characterised by a power differential between political and corporate interests and some of the most marginalised sections of our society.
In medieval warfare, homes were destroyed as a show of conquest. In modern history as well, India has seen several episodes of domicide. Soon after the rebellion of 1857, the British colonial government demolished houses as a show of their brutal reign against the rebellious population. In this disciplining action, large neighbourhoods in Delhi were flattened. The period of emergency also saw episodes of domicide when Sanjay Gandhi led demolition drives in a bid to remove slums from Delhi. The Turkman Gate domicide is a dark chapter in our history. Slum clearances are also routine in contemporary Indian cities, especially ahead of major events. Delhi saw a massive domicide before the 2010 Commonwealth Games and last year, before the G20 summit.
Democide as punishment
More recently, we are seeing a novel form of domicide in India where governments have used it against minorities and dissidents as a form of punishment — giving rise to the phenomenon of bulldozer politics. In my research, I call this punitive domicide — the destruction of homes that is executed as punishment. Many elected politicians and rallies have used the JCB bulldozer as a symbol of their politics including a 2022 India Day procession organised by a group of Indians in New Jersey. All cases of punitive domicide — Jahangirpuri, Prayagraj, Kargone, Nuh, etc — show a pattern. The phenomenon is marked by a provocative event, followed by a response and protest, police action, a political narrative of “bulldozing the houses of rioters”, and the execution of domicide by local development authority using municipality acts and other development norms.
We should evolve our vocabulary to understand this novel form of violence by including words that can comprehensively represent the act of destroying someone’s home. While “domicide” is used by researchers of geography, architecture and urban studies, the Indian media and intelligentsia should include it — as a concept and word — in their language and consciousness. We should depart from the language of legality and recognise the destruction of homes as a form of violence on its inhabitants. The word “demolition” is simply not enough.
The writer is an architect and a graduate scholar of South Asia at the University of Oxford
