Addressing a public function in Hoshangabad in December 2020, Shivraj Singh Chouhan declared that he “will wipe out criminals from Madhya Pradesh and bury them 10 feet under”. It was the sort of stock speech that the chief minister would have been expected to deliver on “Good Governance Day”.
But it soon became clear that these were ominous words, the opening salvo in what has come to be known as the “bulldozer campaign”. In the year and a half since the Hoshangabad speech, Chouhan’s bulldozers have razed homes and shops in almost all the state’s 52 districts. The chief minister has portrayed the “bulldozer campaign” as overdue, if legally dubious action, against “the mafia” and “organised criminals”.
