A state government’s interference in a high-profile crime case offers another indication of religious polarization in Narendra Modi’s India, writes Betwa Sharma.
Mohammad Akhlaq. (Akhlaq family photo)
By Betwa Sharma
in Delhi, India
CN at 30
Special to Consortium News
Ten years after Mohammad Akhlaq, a Muslim man, was brutally beaten to death by a Hindu mob, his family’s lawyer is fighting a push by the government of the state of Uttar Pradesh to drop the criminal charges against 10 defendants in the high-profile 2015 case, which include murder.
The development in the Akhlaq case is just one more example in an alarming trend of excusing sectarian killings since Hindu nationalists came to power in India.
Last week, a judge approved a request by the Akhlaqs’ lawyer, Yusuf Saifi, to file an objection to the state’s plea to drop charges, citing the extraordinary nature of the move in a case involving IPC 302, the murder section of the penal code.
“If you want to argue the case, you can,” the judge told Saifi. “Have you ever heard a case under IPC 302 being withdrawn? Get an application.”
The next hearing is Thursday, Dec. 18.
Saifi, the victims’ lawyer, has rejected what he called an attempt by authorities in the massive northern state to influence the court and shield the killers. “This is a mob lynching,” he said in November, following the state’s move in October to get the case dropped. “You cannot take back such a case.”
Uttar Pradesh (UP), with a population of more than 240 million people, has long been a hotspot of communal tensions.
Six months before Narendra Modi was elected prime minister in 2014, a devastating round of violence erupted in Muzaffarnagar in western UP, leaving 46 Muslims and 16 Hindus dead.
After that, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) went on to win nearly all of the state’s 80 parliamentary seats, a pivotal factor in providing Modi with a clear majority.
During that 2014 national campaign, BJP leaders assured Hindu voters in UP that the men accused in the 2013 riots, who were from the politically influential Jat community of landholding families, would not face prosecution.
In 2017, the Bharatiya Janata Party claimed a decisive victory in UP’s state-level elections, after which the BJP state government withdrew 77 cases related to the 2013 riots, saying that some were politically motivated, weak and not in the public interest.
When the matter reached the Supreme Court, it noted that cases cannot be withdrawn casually, especially in serious riot cases. The court stressed that the government must clearly justify withdrawals, and the cases involving lawmakers require proper judicial scrutiny and High Court approval.
It remains unclear how many cases were ultimately withdrawn. According to an Indian Express report, at least one case — implicating 12 BJP leaders, including a sitting minister, a legislator, and two prominent right-wing figures — was formally withdrawn.
After the BJP sweep in 2017, Uttar Pradesh’s atmosphere began to shift noticeably. What had once been fringe elements seemed to come out of the woodwork: vigilante groups began stopping and attacking Muslims whom they suspected of transporting beef or cows for slaughter, which is illegal in Uttar Pradesh as in most of India.
‘Restoring Social Harmony’
The UP government’s withdrawal application of Mohammad Akhlaq’s murder case relies on a discrepancy in the number of attackers reported by the victim’s wife, daughter and son, who himself was severely beaten and required two brain surgeries.
Even though investigators recovered heavy sticks, steel rods and bricks, the state said no weapons or sharp weapons were used, and there was no prior enmity between the accused and his family.
The illogic of all this becomes evident in the final justification offered: that the withdrawal is necessary in the interests of “restoring social harmony” between Hindus and Muslims.
“Social harmony” in this case is obviously in the eye of the beholder.
For India’s minority Muslim community — 200 million of a 1.3 billion population — there can be no hint of harmony in the UP government’s effort to drop charges in this notorious case, known as the “2015 Dadri lynching,” which sparked widespread national outrage at the time. It can only represent another sign that the political will to prosecute crimes targeting Muslims is steadily ebbing.
A High-Profile Murder
Akhlaq, a 52-year-old ironsmith, had a wife, daughter and two sons. His elder son served as a technician in the Indian Air Force — a matter of some pride for the family, his relatives have told me in the past.
He was killed on the night of Sept. 28, 2015, in the UP village of Bisada near the town of Dadria after a Hindu temple circulated a rumour that Akhlaq’s household was committing the sacrilege of storing cow meat. (For many Hindus, cows, which provide milk and livelihoods to poor communities, are symbols of life and purity associated with Lord Krishna, who is depicted as a cowherd in Hindu mythology.)
A mob gathered and stormed Akhlaq’s home. Some of the attackers dragged Akhlaq and his younger son, Danish, outside and beat the father to death.
At the time of Akhalq’s murder, the BJP did not yet govern Uttar Pradesh and therefore was not responsible for law and order, which is a state subject, a point the Modi government repeatedly emphasised as Muslim lynchings in India began to rise.
The Akhalaq case comes after several other high-profile sectarian murders of Muslims.
‘The First One’ — Mohsin Sheikh
Bombay High Court building in Mumbai, 2016. (A.Savin /Wikimedia Commons/ FAL)
More than a year before Akhlaq’s killing, Mohsin Shaikh, a 28-year-old IT professional, was murdered by a Hindu mob on June 2, 2014, close to 1,500 km away in the city of Pune in the state of Maharashtra.
People often refer to the Shaikh case as the “first one under Modi” because it happened just after the BJP came to power in the May 2014 national election. It was still too early at that time to tell if India would head sharply to the right.
Shaikh was reportedly killed because he was identified as Muslim amid communal tensions triggered by provocative social-media posts about Hindu historical and political figures.
On Jan. 12, 2017, the Bombay High Court granted bail to three of the 21 accused in Mohsin Shaikh’s 2014 murder, noting they had no prior criminal record. The judge controversially suggested that the accused had been provoked “in the name of religion.”
In 2023, the court in Pune, where the murder was committed, acquitted all accused, citing insufficient evidence to prove their involvement or motive.
The Babri Masjid Demolition
Amid rising concerns about religious polarisation, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India delivered another controversial verdict in still another high-profile case in November 2019.
This concerned the Dec. 6, 1992, demolition by Hindu nationalists of the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya
While the court acknowledged that the demolition by Hindu mobs was illegal, it unanimously awarded the disputed land to Hindu claimants for the construction of a temple, citing their long-standing worship and historical possession of the site.
The newly constructed Shree Ram Janmaboomi Temple in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, on Jan. 22, 2024. (Prime Minister’s Office , Wikimedia Commons, GODL-India)
State-Sanctioned Islamophobia
Communal violence in India predates independence and Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and has persisted despite the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of cultural and political plurality in a secular state with “unity in diversity.”
Under Modi, however, the nature of this violence has shifted. Attacks are now one-sided, with Hindus targeting Muslims through incidents like lynchings and humiliation, alongside a much broader and more everyday process of alienating Muslims as “the other.” The state itself is increasingly involved, using laws and institutions to reinforce Muslim marginalisation.
Official figures don’t exist about Islamophobic crimes, partly because India has no specific legal category for hate crimes, and two independent hate-crime trackers were shut down as critical reporting became harder.
But the rise of Islamophobia, along with the surge in violent attacks against Muslims, has been extensively documented in human rights reports and contested by the Modi government.
When U.S. President Barack Obama appeared in India in January 2015, reports of persecution against minorities were already emerging. In a speech during his visit, Obama said that India’s success depended on upholding its constitutional commitment to religious freedom and equality.
It was a striking moment: a U.S. president appearing alongside Modi, the newly elected prime minister, who for years had been denied a visa to the United States following the 2002 riots in Gujarat, during which more than 1,000 people were killed in communal violence in the state he governed as chief minister.
At the time, critics and several human-rights groups accused Modi of failing to prevent the violence, accusations he has consistently denied. Modi went on to be elected chief minister of Gujarat three more times, and a special investigation team appointed by the Supreme Court of India later cleared him of wrongdoing.
Spreading Hindu Extremism
In Indore, a city in the BJP-ruled state of Madhya Pradesh, Hindus and Muslims until recently ran businesses side-by-side and some even partnered together, in the largest garment market.
This BJP stronghold now appears to be more Islamophobic than neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. Hindu vigilantes have openly campaigned for and orchestrated the eviction of Muslim business owners, managers and salesmen in Indore.
While these groups displayed anti-Muslim banners throughout the market, some Hindu landlords carried out the evictions reluctantly, acting under duress and fearing the vigilantes. Despite repeated pleas from both Hindu and Muslim traders, neither the state nor the courts intervened to prevent these evictions.
Elsewhere, fringe Hindu extremist groups have increasingly promoted calls for the economic and social boycott of Muslims, first in whispers, and now openly.
Segregation and everyday discrimination have become more entrenched, seen in incidents of Hindus refusing to do business with Muslims or barring them from entering residential colonies to sell their goods.
Not all states are governed by the same political forces, and some regions remain relatively unaffected by majoritarian policies.
In a country as vast and diverse as India, it is difficult to generalise.
Millions of moviegoers watch Shah Rukh Khan, the Muslim Bollywood superstar, while many poorly made right-wing propaganda movies fail at the box office. In the state of Maharashtra, thousands gather to catch a glimpse of the celebrity outside his house in Mumbai, a city that also hosts rallies to intimidate and humiliate Muslims.
Certain states, including states governed by the BJP, some with majority Christian populations, continue to allow the sale and consumption of cow meat.
But there is no doubt that Muslims, cutting across class lines, have been affected by the clear social dominance of Hindus. Many are terrified of being picked on by the authorities or vigilantes, and are careful about not carrying meat in trains.
A group of young men beat up a 70-year-old Muslim man because he was carrying beef on a train in the state of Maharashtra.
In several states, “bulldozer” demolitions have targeted the homes of people accused of crimes — many of them Muslims — despite Supreme Court directions that residences cannot be destroyed without due process.
The crackdown on interfaith relationships between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman — already rare — has intensified to the point where couples can face not only harassment and mob violence but even arrest. Many of these relationships are targeted under laws aimed at preventing forced religious conversion, which have been made increasingly strict in several states.
Such statutes are frequently invoked amid claims by sections of the Hindu right that Christians conduct covert conversions and that Muslim men deceive Hindu women into relationships for conversion. These allegations are unsubstantiated and rooted in long-standing communal narratives.
The government has taken several steps to identify non-citizens, including revising electoral rolls and updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, the state bordering Bangladesh. Many of these measures build on policies developed over decades, particularly following the large influx of refugees from the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Home Minister Amit Shah has called Bangladeshi migrants “termites.”
While authorities assert that these measures focus on Bangladeshi Muslims and Rohingya Muslims living in India illegally, Indian Muslim citizens have also been wrongfully deported to Bangladesh.
India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, but it has historically provided recognition to individuals fleeing persecution.
The Modi government has significantly weakened India’s historically sympathetic approach toward refugees escaping persecution. There have been reports of severe and alarming actions, including an instance where Rohingya refugees — women and children among them — were allegedly dropped into the sea near the Myanmar coast and forced to swim back to the country they had fled.
Betwa Sharma is the managing editor of Article 14, the former politics editor at HuffPost India, and the former U.N./New York correspondent for the Press Trust of India. She has also reported for numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Intercept.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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This deterioration in communal relations, and the increase in sectarian violence is alarming. I read Joe Sacco’s latest book, “A Once and Future Riot,” unaware of the subject matter, but I soon discovered it was about the riots in UP, and sounds very much like the one the article mentions at the beginning, where the state is trying to get the charges dismissed. I’ve got a ticket to visit India in the near future. I hope to not witness any of this kind of outrageous behaviour.
It’s heartbreaking to see that this human species seems to have such a hard time learning that we can only survive by taking care of one another, not by killing each other.
Religion stalks across the face of human history, knee-deep in the blood of innocents, clasping its red hands in hymns of praise to an approving God. “Religion poisons everything!” – the great atheist Christopher Hitchens. RIP Christopher.