Election Watch: Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, 2027 | Edition 2 | October 2026

In October, Uttar Pradesh police shot and injured at least 34 Muslim men across 13 districts in ‘half-encounters’, the colloquial term for police shootings of suspects, usually in the legs, before their formal arrest. About half were accused in cattle-related cases. In Bareilly on 9 October, police shot two men accused of cow slaughter, hours after Hindu organisations protested over the alleged slaughter.

On 23 October, an Associated Press investigation found that the state’s police had shot nearly 650 people accused of cow smuggling since 2020. Of the 627 whom AP identified, nearly 93 per cent were Muslim. State police data obtained by AP show that police have killed 316 people in ‘encounters’ since March 2017, 110 of them Muslim. Police routinely describe these fatal shootings as self-defence.

On 25 October, Dainik Jagran, a Hindi daily, reported that ten men in Rampur who were on bail in cattle cases had surrendered and gone back to jail, out of fear, the paper said, of being shot in police ‘encounters’. A senior district police officer confirmed the figure. In one case, a man’s father-in-law withdrew as his surety on 21 September, and the court sent the man back to jail.

In Uttarakhand, police shot three Muslim men: Arif in Haridwar district around 4 October, and Samim and Shahzad in Dehradun on 31 October.

Parvez Parwaz, 72, a prisoner in Gorakhpur jail, Uttar Pradesh, died on 11 October. He was serving a sentence in a separate case. In 2008, he had secured the registration of a police case against Yogi Adityanath, now the state’s Chief Minister, over a speech Adityanath made in 2007. The jail superintendent said Parwaz complained of breathing difficulty and died after being taken to hospital. A lawyer sought an independent inquiry. (Also see sections on Torture and Ill-Treatment and Deprivation of Life in the India Persecution Tracker 2026/3.)

At least eight anti-Muslim speeches by officials and Hindu nationalist figures were reported in Uttar Pradesh in October, three by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. On 7 October, he said the election had “once again shaped up as an ’80 Vs. 20′ contest”. The 20 per cent was read as a reference to the state’s Muslims, who were about 19 per cent of Uttar Pradesh’s population at the 2011 Census.

In Balrampur on 10 October, he said: “We will not allow any miscreants to flourish in border areas, nor will we allow the demography to change.”

In Bareilly on 13 October, he said those who once instigated riots were now “observing Urs in jail”. Urs is a Muslim commemoration of a saint’s death.

The BJP’s national president, Nitin Nabin, accused the opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on 7 October of seeking rights for “ghuspaithiyas”, the term the BJP’s top leadership uses in branding Muslims as ‘infiltrators’.

On 23 October, hoardings appeared in three cities describing “riots, iftar and biryani” as the real story of rule by the Samajwadi Party, the state’s main opposition party. Iftar is the meal that breaks the Ramadan fast.

In Uttarakhand, Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami asked on 6 October whether ‘infiltrators’ should be allowed to vote.

In Bareilly, videos reported on 27 October showed young men assaulting an elderly Muslim man and forcing him to chant ‘Jai Shri Ram’, a Hindu nationalist slogan. Election Watch recorded no killing in either state in October that was suspected to be an anti-Muslim hate crime. (Also see sections on Advocacy of Religious Hatred and Torture and Ill-Treatment in the India Persecution Tracker 2026/3.)

On 22 October, Uttar Pradesh’s Chief Electoral Officer, the state’s top election official, said that 10,470 entries in the voter roll of Pilibhit constituency showed ‘irregularities’, and a police case was registered against two officials and a computer assistant. Opposition leaders said most of the voters whose details were altered were Muslim. The Chief Electoral Officer then ordered checks of voter rolls across the state, and on 31 October shut computer assistants out of the Election Commission’s online system.

The state’s voter roll had been rebuilt in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), in which election officials verified every voter afresh and deleted 20.4 million names by April 2026, as Edition 1 recorded.

On 27 October, The Wire reported that police in Sultanpur had registered a case over forms that sought to delete 26 voters and bore the ‘signature’ of Nandlal Nishad, who cannot sign his name. Nishad had complained eight months earlier. The Chief Electoral Officer said the forms were never processed.

On 30 October, on a petition by Tanuj Punia, a member of parliament from the Congress, India’s main national opposition party, the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to examine objections filed in bulk to delete voters from the rolls. The same day, Adityanath told BJP workers that 12.7 million Hindus were missing from the rolls, and asked them to enrol Hindu voters.

After polls on 23 October for 11 seats in the state’s Legislative Council, its upper house, the Election Commission on 26 October ordered the suspension of six officials in Agra over lapses in the conduct of the poll. The runner-up in Gorakhpur alleged the count was rigged and sought a fresh poll. (Also see section on Disenfranchisement and Denationalisation in the India Persecution Tracker 2026/3.)

On 31 October, the Enforcement Directorate, India’s federal financial crimes agency, arrested Azam Khan, 78, a Samajwadi Party leader and former state minister, at the gate of Rampur jail, minutes after his release on bail in another case. Khan said: “This is the punishment for being a Muslim.”

Three days earlier, the agency had frozen the land and buildings of Mohammad Ali Jauhar University in Rampur, which Khan founded, alleging that public funds were diverted to build it. (Also see section on Discrimination in Access to Economic, Social & Cultural Rights in the India Persecution Tracker 2026/3.)

Police in both states also placed opposition politicians under house arrest. On 10 October, they confined Congress leaders and workers in Hamirpur and Haridwar, and Samajwadi Party leaders in Kasganj, to stop them joining a protest in Delhi against the Chief Election Commissioner.

In Uttarakhand, police held Congress leaders at home during visits by Dhami, in Champawat on 18 October and in Dehradun around 19 October. In Basti, Uttar Pradesh, police placed a Congress leader under house arrest on 28 October to keep the leader from a party meeting.

In Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh, police arrested a muezzin, the mosque official who gives the call to prayer, on 10 October, alleging that his call was too loud. In Varanasi, the Public Works Department said in October that demolitions for a road in the Dalmandi locality, serving the Kashi Vishwanath temple corridor, were complete, and had taken two mosques in full and four in part. In Sitapur, a notice dated 5 October gave a mosque seven days to clear land the authorities record as a graveyard.

In Uttarakhand, the state ended the Friday holiday in recognised madrasas, or Islamic schools, on 21 October, moving it to Sunday. An official confirmed on 23 October that 10 unregistered madrasas had been sealed in Udham Singh Nagar district. On 31 October, authorities razed 86 houses in a mostly Muslim settlement at Puchhri, in Nainital district, saying they stood on forest land. (Also see sections on Religious Freedom and Discrimination in Access to Economic, Social & Cultural Rights in the India Persecution Tracker 2026/3.)