Overview of human rights abuses and violations against India’s religious minorities from 1 May to 31 July, 2026.
The three months under review in this edition of the India Persecution Tracker—May to July 2026—were the first under the expanded map of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rule following provincial elections that concluded in early May: the Party now governs both West Bengal, won for the first time in the party’s history, and Assam, retained by a Chief Minister on record pledging to make Bengali-origin Muslims ‘suffer’. Across the country, particularly in the states governed by the BJP, the reporting period saw state actors continue to deploy the full, long-documented repertoire of coercion against Muslims—killing them in staged police ‘encounters’ and in custody, hundreds detained (and in Kashmir, multiple thousands), bulldozing their homes and places of worship, and forcing families through the border fence into Bangladesh at night—while killings by Hindu extremist mobs put the year on course to be the deadliest for anti-Muslim hate crimes since this Tracker began recording them in 2022.
What advanced farthest this quarter, however, was the machinery that requires no mob. Within weeks of taking office, West Bengal’s new government joined a national apparatus that previous editions have traced: electoral rolls purged of tens of millions of voters, with appeals left undecided; food and welfare benefits conditioned on citizenship screening; Muslim personal law overridden and worship restricted; and detained ‘infiltrators’ handed to border forces without being produced before a judicial forum. Little of this turns on anything a person has done. Through legislation, policy and official rhetoric, India’s highest public officials continued to condemn Muslims as a racialised outsider group—presumptively foreign in their own country, their belonging in India permanently conditional—the construction upon which every register, form and demolition order then goes to work. United Nations Special Rapporteurs, examining the voter deletions in May, described its logic in as many words: official rhetoric that ‘conflates legitimate Indian Muslim citizens with foreign nationals’ amounts to incitement to discrimination under international law. It is that system of discrimination whose operation this edition documents.
The incidents documented in this edition, covering the period from 1 May to 31 July 2026, are not exhaustive. They record only what was reported and could be verified—a fraction of the whole, in a country where the space for independent reporting narrowed further over these three months. The patterns they establish, however, are unmistakable.
A brief overview of the key findings:
- • State actors continued to kill, maim, torture and arbitrarily detain Muslims, with the gravest abuses concentrated in Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Kashmir and, newly, West Bengal. At least 15 Muslims were killed by police and security personnel during the quarter, bringing the year’s toll to at least 19. Uttar Pradesh’s government published its latest ledger of the ‘encounter’ killing policy in May: 289 killed and 11,834 injured in 17,043 police operations since 2017, a toll it presents as achievement. In Kashmir, security forces detained over 2,500 people within 48 hours of a single militant attack in July and demolished two families’ homes with explosives; across at least six states, police responding to nationwide student protests selectively arrested Muslims—13 of the 14 people arrested at one Kolkata demonstration were Muslim—while in Delhi, security forces fired pellet guns at protesting students, the first reported use of the weapon in the national capital. [Deprivation of Life — State Actors] [Arrests and Detentions] [Torture and Ill-Treatment — State Acto
Hindu extremist actors killed at least 10 Muslims in religiously-motivated hate crimes across five states—among them an 11-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy. With 25 Muslims killed in the year’s first seven months, 2026 is on track to be the deadliest year for such killings since this Tracker began recording them in 2022. Communal mob violence targeting Muslims was reported from five states, at its worst in West Bengal, where the days after the BJP’s first-ever state election victory brought attacks on mosques, Muslim-owned businesses and hawkers’ quarters that killed at least two people, one of them while trying to protect a mosque. [Deprivation of Life — Non-State Actors] [Torture and Ill-Treatment — Non-State Actors] - The nationwide state machinery directed at Bengali-speaking Muslims—voter-roll deletion at one end, expulsion at gunpoint at the other—ran at full capacity. The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls that began last year entered its third phase, with roughly 60 million voters deleted nationwide; the Supreme Court upheld the exercise in May while directing that voters deleted on citizenship grounds be referred for formal citizenship determination—converting, by judicial order, an electoral purge into a citizenship pipeline.
In West Bengal, the state’s new BJP government instructed police to hand detained ‘infiltrators’ to border forces without producing them in court and claimed 4,800 ‘deportations’ in its first month; wrote citizenship screening into food rations and women’s income support; removed 77 Muslim communities from the backward-classes reservation list; cut the minority-affairs and madrasa budget by 62 per cent and placed the state’s madrasas under surveillance; restricted cattle slaughter days before Eid al-Adha, collapsing a rural economy shared by Muslim, Dalit, Adivasi and Hindu smallholders alike; and charged protest arrestees—13 of total 14 being Muslim—under a new preventive-detention law as its Chief Minister called them ‘those Friday people’. The systematic targeting of Muslims that took years to assemble elsewhere in India arrived in Bengal more or less at once.
In neighbouring Assam, the ‘pushback’ expulsions continued at the border—1,679 people ‘sent back’ over two years by the Chief Minister’s latest account—and Human Rights Watch documented Indian forces marching families, children included, through cuts in the border fence at night. [Disenfranchisement & Denationalisation] [Forced Expulsions & Refoulement] - Fuelling the violence was anti-Muslim rhetoric that continued to be delivered by the holders of the highest constitutional offices. UN Special Rapporteurs formally warned that senior ministers’ ‘Detect, Delete and Deport’ rhetoric towards so-called ‘infiltrators’ conflates Indian Muslim citizens with foreigners and could amount to incitement to discrimination under international law. Alongside, public calls by Hindu extremists for the genocide of Muslims at a mass gathering near Delhi drew no police action of any kind. The one legislative attempt to strengthen India’s hate-speech laws, passed in opposition-governed Karnataka, was blocked by the central government as unnecessary. [Advocacy of Religious Hatred]
- The legal architecture of exclusion continued to grow. Assam and Madhya Pradesh enacted Uniform Civil Codes overriding Muslim personal law—four BJP-ruled states now have them, with three more drafting, every exercise chaired by the same retired judge—while Parliament made ‘insulting’ the song Vande Mataram, which many Muslims decline to sing on grounds of conscience, punishable with up to three years’ imprisonment. A High Court declared the centuries-old Kamal Maula Mosque a Hindu temple and ended Friday prayers there; at least 23 Muslim religious structures were demolished in under two months across six states; and in total, over 1,000 Muslim homes, businesses and religious structures were razed in at least 21 demolition episodes across eight states—over 3,000 in 2026 so far—as the Supreme Court declined to enforce its own demolition safeguards, remitting the contempt petitions to the High Courts. [Religious Freedom] [Discrimination in ESC Rights]
- The space for anyone to object kept shrinking. The state’s answer to a nationwide, avowedly secular student movement over an examination scandal was pellet guns and mass detentions; over 100 students were injured on a single July day. [Shrinking Civic Space & Democratic Backsliding]
- Perpetuating all of this was the near-total absence of domestic remedy. The quarter’s fresh judgments confirmed impunity for the oldest cases—appellate courts upheld the acquittal of all 22 accused, 21 of them police officers, in a 2005 staged-‘encounter’ triple killing, and of five men accused of burning a Muslim man alive in 2002—while the newest cases repeated the pattern: custodial deaths recorded as accidents, investigations into victims themselves, and efforts to shield powerful perpetrators. The quarter’s most consequential act of judicial courage—a Muslim judge sentencing fourteen cow vigilantes to life imprisonment for a lynching—ended with the judge herself requiring police protection following threats from Hindu extremists. [Lack of Effective Remedy]
Some international actors, including UN bodies and experts, continued to raise alarm during the reporting period about the deteriorating situation in India:
- The Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General addressed the Delhi crackdown directly: people wishing to protest peacefully must be able to do so ‘without the fear of harassment, the fear of arrest, or the fear of injury.’
- India comes before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) at its 118th session in August 2026—its first review in nineteen years, on a State report submitted thirteen years late. In an Early Warning & Urgent Action Procedure (EWUAP) action letter, in early May, the Committee flagged a mega-development project in the Great Nicobar Island that threatens the extinction of the Shompen tribe. (See here a joint alternative report submitted by a coalition of Indian, diaspora and international civil society organisations, including the South Asia Justice Campaign, ahead of India’s upcoming review.)
- UN Special Procedures mandate-holders continued to engage India on multiple fronts, including: a communication from three Special Rapporteurs on the mass voter-roll deletions, warning of wrongful exclusion of Muslims and voters of Bengali descent; a statement by the Special Rapporteur on freedom of peaceful assembly recording at least 100 students injured in the 20 July crackdown; and a statement by three Special Rapporteurs urging the release of five indigenous human rights defenders detained in Assam over their opposition to a luxury hotel project.
- At a hearing of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in May, Stephen Rapp, who prosecuted the media architects of the Rwandan genocide, told the Commission that the ruling party’s anti-Muslim propaganda in Assam reminded him of material published in Rwanda three years before the genocide. (See here a recent report by an independent expert panel co-chaired by Rapp, examining violations of international law against Muslims in Assam and Uttar Pradesh)
- The CIVICUS Monitor added India to its Watchlist of countries experiencing severe declines in civic freedoms, retaining its ‘Repressed’ rating, and the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index dropped India six places to 157 of 180, in its ‘very serious’ category.
- Confronted abroad, the Indian government dismissed all concerns about its deteriorating human rights record. When the Dutch Prime Minister voiced concern over press freedom and ‘the rights of minorities, which are under severe pressure’, India’s Ministry of External Affairs attributed the question to ‘a lack of understanding’; in Oslo days later, the same official told journalists that such questions came from reading ‘one or two reports published by some god-forsaken, ignorant NGOs‘.
During the period under review, Muslims continued to be killed extrajudicially by state actors across India in a range of settings. In Uttar Pradesh and Assam, both governed by the BJP, police continued to kill men in allegedly staged ‘encounters’, with official data and independent analysis alike pointing to Muslims as the group most disproportionately targeted. In Gujarat, a 70-year-old Muslim man died in police custody days after he was arrested on cow-slaughter charges; in Jammu & Kashmir, police shot dead a Muslim autorickshaw driver at a night checkpoint; and across six states, Muslim men died in police lock-ups and in prison, in deaths their families attribute to torture or the denial of medical care.
The cases above are illustrative of long-running patterns documented by the IPT, and not an exhaustive account of state-actor killings of Muslims during the period. Government data tabled in parliament recorded 170 custodial deaths in India in 2025–26 up to 15 March 2026, with only one case of disciplinary action in the preceding five years.
In February 2026, the UN Special Rapporteurs on torture and on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions warned of ‘systemic’ policing failures in India, citing a ‘pervasive pattern of excessive and often lethal use of force by police’, particularly in Uttar Pradesh and Assam, with Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis disproportionately affected. No further communication on the pattern was issued during the present period.
These killings engage the right to life under Article 6 of the ICCPR and the State’s duty to conduct a prompt, independent, impartial and effective investigation under Article 2(3), as elaborated in the Minnesota Protocol, together with India’s obligations under the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. In none of the cases documented above was there an independent investigation into the officers involved: ‘encounter’ killings rested on the police’s own account of self-defence, unsupported by external evidence; custodial deaths were entered as unnatural deaths, illnesses or suicides; and in the Ahmedabad custodial death, no criminal case was registered at all until the Supreme Court ordered one two months after the death, and then assigned it to a team drawn from the same state police force.
In 2025, the IPT documented the killings of at least 23 Muslims in incidents involving police, armed forces, or other state security personnel—up from 21 in 2024 and 20 in 2023.
During the period under review, at least ten Muslims—among them an 11-year-old girl, a 16-year-old boy, a 66-year-old man, and two men lynched together—were killed by cow vigilantes and other non-state actors across five states. Bihar again recorded the highest number (3), as it did in the previous edition (4). Two further killings from the previous reporting period, both from late-April, are also documented in this edition: an imam assaulted on a train in Uttar Pradesh, and a cattle transporter who drowned fleeing cow vigilantes in Jammu & Kashmir.
The cases documented above are illustrative of long-running patterns of violence against Muslims. In several, the immediate trigger was a mundane dispute—over parking, a road collision, a game of cricket among children—that escalated into a fatal assault, consistent with the broader environment of anti-Muslim hate speech and vigilantism documented in successive editions of the IPT.
These killings raise serious concerns under international human rights law, in particular the right to life under Article 6 of the ICCPR and the State’s positive obligation to protect individuals from violence by private actors. Under established international law, a State may be held responsible for killings by non-state actors where it fails to exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate and punish them. In several of the cases above, the response fell short of that standard: complaints were registered only after the victim had died, or not as murder despite the death; no arrests were made although the accused were named; and the cause of death was disputed against the family’s account.
In July 2025, a group of UN Special Procedures mandate-holders wrote to India over reports of more than 300 such killings since 2014, disproportionately of Muslims, expressing concern that impunity had ‘generated cycles of repression’ and noting that States may be held responsible for the conduct of non-state actors where they fail to exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate and respond to it.
In 2025, the IPT documented the killings of 27 Muslims in mob or vigilante violence by Hindu extremist non-state actors.
During the period under review, Indian authorities continued to carry out widespread arbitrary arrests and detentions of Muslims across multiple states. These included the selective targeting of Muslim participants in nationwide youth protests; mass detentions of over 2,500 people in Kashmir; continued arrests under anti-conversion and cow-protection laws in BJP-governed states, with enforcement reaching into private homes and targeting women and minors; the arrest and prolonged detention of a pregnant Muslim woman on charges arising from an unfounded ‘corporate jihad’ narrative; and the recurring pattern of disproportionate targeting of Muslims following communal and inter-community violence, including the booking of victims as accused.
The arrests documented above engage the right to liberty and security of person under Article 9 of the ICCPR and the prohibition of arbitrary detention, including the right to be informed of the reasons for arrest and to be brought promptly before a judge. Their discriminatory character—targeting Muslims systematically and disproportionately—engages Articles 2(1) and 26 of the ICCPR and Article 5(a) of ICERD, which guarantees the right to equal treatment before tribunals and all organs administering justice. Where arrests followed the exercise of freedom of religion, expression or peaceful assembly, they constitute an attack on the rights protected under Articles 18, 19 and 21 of the ICCPR, with a chilling effect on all who would exercise them.
During the reporting period, state actors continued to be implicated in serious cases of torture, ill-treatment and excessive use of force, directed primarily at Muslims. These included the continuation of ‘half-encounter’ shootings in Uttar Pradesh and their spread to cow-protection policing in Haryana’s Nuh; the use of pellet guns, electric shocks and custodial abuse against student protesters in Delhi; the army’s use of Kashmiri civilians as human shields during a search operation in Jammu and Kashmir; and continuing reports of custodial beatings, public humiliation and communal slurs by police across several states.
The cases documented above are illustrative of broader patterns. Torture and ill-treatment remain endemic in India’s policing, routinely used as tools of law enforcement and, in the case of Muslims, frequently shaped by discriminatory religious motives. India has still not ratified the UN Convention against Torture or enacted a standalone law criminalising torture—a gap that sustains near-total impunity, documented by REDRESS and by SAJC in reports on custodial violence against Muslims.
The practices recorded this quarter—’half-encounters’, the use of pellet guns and electric shocks against protesters, and the use of a civilian as a human shield, prohibited under international humanitarian law and a war crime under the Rome Statute, which India has not ratified—echo the “systemic policing failures” that UN Special Rapporteurs warned of in February 2026, and the finding of the Panel of Independent International Experts, in March 2026, that Uttar Pradesh’s ‘half-encounters’ may amount to torture as a crime against humanity. Yet not one of the officers responsible for the abuses documented in this section is known to face even an investigation.
Hindu nationalist and allied non-state actors subjected Muslims and other religious minorities to widespread physical violence, intimidation and humiliation during the reporting period. Communal mob violence targeting Muslims was reported across several states, most severely in West Bengal following the BJP’s assembly victory, with the state response in several cases compounding the harm through selective arrests and, in some, charges against the victims. Dozens of individual hate crimes against Muslims were documented—assaults linked to cow protection, to alleged interfaith relationships, and to the refusal to chant Hindu slogans—alongside sexual and gender-based violence against Muslim women and girls. Christian communities faced continued assault, disruption of worship and burial denial, while inter-ethnic violence in Manipur entered its fourth year.
The patterns documented above raise serious concerns under international human rights law, in relation to the rights to life, security of person, freedom from torture and ill-treatment, and freedom of religion. Under the ICCPR and the Convention against Torture, states are required to exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate and punish violations by non-state actors, and to provide effective remedy to victims. The evidence of this quarter points to failures on each count: perpetrators frequently acted with impunity or political protection, while victims faced police inaction, retaliatory charges—in Latur and Armur, police booked the victims rather than the attackers—or outright complicity. Rather than reflecting isolated institutional failures, these patterns indicate a climate in which non-state violence against religious minorities is tolerated, and in many cases facilitated, by state action and inaction alike.
These developments continue to raise serious concerns under international human rights law, in particular the right to vote at genuine periodic elections under Article 25 of the ICCPR and the prohibition of discrimination in the enjoyment of political rights under Article 5(c) of the ICERD. The Supreme Court’s judgment affirms the right while institutionalising the mechanism that threatens it: a voter deleted for want of documents now faces referral to a citizenship determination in which the burden of proof rests on them. The collapse of the appellate process—under one per cent of appeals decided while deletion takes immediate effect—is difficult to reconcile with the right to an effective remedy under Article 2(3) of the ICCPR.
Mass expulsions of Bengali-speaking Muslims continue as West Bengal joins the ‘pushback’ regime
The mass unilateral expulsion campaign launched by Indian authorities in May 2025—under which thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims have been detained across India and forcibly ‘pushed’ across the India-Bangladesh border without due process—continued into its second year during the period under review, and gained a second major front: West Bengal, under a newly elected BJP government, formally adopted the expulsion model that the previous edition of this Tracker documented in neighbouring Assam (and several other BJP states), with the new Chief Minister claiming roughly 4,800 deportations within his first month in office.
Wrongful detentions of Indian Muslims branded ‘Bangladeshi’ despite valid documents continued to be reported from states far from the border. Courts granted relief in individual cases—but no court has yet examined the legality of the pushback practice itself, and the campaign continued without interruption throughout the period. (Also see section on Disenfranchisement and Denationalisation.)
Within days of taking office on 9 May, the government of Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari made the transfer of land to the Border Security Force (BSF)—the central force guarding the India-Bangladesh border—for border fencing among its first Cabinet decisions. On 20 May, Adhikari announced that his government would join the nationwide ‘detect, delete and deport’ drive announced by the central government: anyone not covered by the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019—which fast-tracks citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from neighbouring countries—would be treated as an ‘infiltrator’, arrested by state police and handed to the BSF for deportation. He instructed police that detained persons would no longer be produced in court: ‘infiltrators will not be sent to courts but handed over to the BSF at the Bangladesh border.’
On 22 May, the state ordered ‘holding centres’ to be set up in every district. On 7 June, Adhikari claimed that 4,800 people had been deported in the preceding month, with 836 more in holding centres awaiting deportation.
On 6 May, a day after the election result, Bangladesh’s foreign minister had warned that Dhaka would ‘take appropriate measures’ if ‘push-in’ incidents followed the change of power in West Bengal. India’s Ministry of External Affairs responded that over 2,862 nationality-verification requests were pending with Bangladesh, and that repatriation should proceed ‘as per our laws, procedures and established bilateral arrangements’.
According to figures published in early May by Prothom Alo, a Bangladeshi newspaper, Indian border forces pushed 2,479 people into Bangladesh between May 2025 and January 2026—and Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), Bangladesh’s border force, identified at least 120 of them as Indian citizens.
The push continued through June. On 4 June, the BGB said it had foiled ten attempts by Indian forces to push people across the border in 24 hours—in one case, 30 to 35 people brought to the border in a prison van. Asked whether pushbacks formed part of India’s deportation process, the Ministry of External Affairs cited the bilateral mechanism and declined to answer the question directly.
In mid-June, Human Rights Watch published detailed independent field documentation of the method. The organisation interviewed nine witnesses who saw Indian border troops bring groups of people—mostly Muslims from West Bengal—to the border at night and push them through cuts in the barbed-wire fencing. Where Bangladeshi border guards refused entry, families were left stranded at the ‘zero line’ between the two countries: in Panchagarh district, a 75-hour standoff over a group of ten people, including children, ended only when Indian forces escorted them back; at Tetulbaria, two families spent a night in the open between the border forces of the two countries.
The BGB reported foiling 21 attempts to push more than 200 people, including children, across the border between 1 June and mid-June alone. ‘Indian authorities are cruelly dumping families into Bangladesh or leaving them stranded at the border,’ said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, urging the government to ‘end this dismaying animosity toward Muslims.’
In Assam, the focal point of the campaign so far, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told the state Assembly on 13 July that 1,679 people had been ‘sent back’ to Bangladesh in the two years to 30 June 2026. They included 193 people declared foreigners by Foreigners Tribunals—quasi-judicial bodies unique to Assam that adjudicate citizenship on documentary evidence—among them an infant girl expelled with her mother, and 67 people expelled under the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, a revived law that empowers district officials to expel people while bypassing the tribunals altogether.
In late May, Scroll published the account of a 68-year-old Bengali Muslim woman from Assam’s Barpeta district who was pushed into Bangladesh at gunpoint in May 2025, one of at least 300 Assam residents expelled this way, and returned a month later with the help of villagers on both sides of the border. A year on, she is bedridden, her health broken, and afraid the police ‘will pick her up and throw her in Bangladesh again’. All nine of her siblings are Indian citizens; her citizenship case turned on spelling variations in decades-old voter lists.
In mid-June, Mumtaz Begum, a 44-year-old Bengali-origin Muslim woman from Nagaon district, was pushed into Bangladesh with no deportation order, while her citizenship case remained pending before the very tribunal a court had ordered to rehear it.
In April, the Gauhati High Court had set aside a tribunal order declaring her a foreigner—finding her documentary evidence had been discarded ‘without any discussion’—and directed a fresh hearing. When she appeared before the tribunal on 30 May, the member ordered her arrest within minutes, without passing any order, her lawyer said. She was taken to the Matia transit camp, India’s largest detention centre, and expelled through the Cachar district border. Her family learned of her whereabouts only when the state government admitted the expulsion to the High Court on 24 June—five days after the court had directed that she not be deported.
Judicial interventions during the period remained confined to individual cases. On 5 June, the Supreme Court stayed the deportation of four women held at the Matia camp in Assam, whose documents tribunals had rejected over spelling discrepancies and minor inconsistencies. On 8 July, the last four members of the two Birbhum families whose deportation the previous edition of this Tracker documented—Sunali Khatun’s husband and Sweety Bibi with her two sons—returned to India through the Malda border, a year after being pushed into Bangladesh; the Union government had told the Supreme Court it would bring them back ‘not as a precedent’ to be followed in similar cases.
On 13 July, the Supreme Court quashed 27 orders of the Gauhati High Court and Foreigners Tribunals declaring people foreigners, holding that citizenship determination must be ‘fair, lawful and reasoned’ and that the statutory burden of proof ‘does not authorise a mechanical declaration’. Each of these was relief for named individuals. None examined the pushback practice itself—which in West Bengal now operates, by the Chief Minister’s explicit instruction, without any court seeing the detainee at all.
Alongside, mass detention drives against alleged illegal migrants extended far from the eastern border. In Gujarat, police detained 501 people as undocumented Bangladeshis in the first two days of a statewide operation named ‘Operation Delta Hunt’ in early June, with over 6,200 more placed under investigation; those detained in such drives are moved to the eastern border states for expulsion.
In Maharashtra, Thane authorities detained three Muslim women and a child from West Bengal as suspected ‘Bangladeshis’ despite passports and voter cards already verified by West Bengal authorities, releasing them late on 9 June only after public protests. In July, twelve migrant workers from Malda district were detained in the same city, eight of whom appear on the current electoral roll and voted in this year’s West Bengal election.
No consolidated official figure for expulsions exists: the numbers above are each government’s own claims, covering different periods and categories, and cannot be added into a national total.
These forced expulsions continue to raise serious concerns under international human rights law and international criminal law. The systematic bypassing of individualised assessment, the denial of any opportunity to contest expulsion, and the absence of judicial oversight violate the safeguards required under Article 13 of the ICCPR and the prohibition of collective expulsion. In its report released in March 2026, the Panel of Independent International Experts (PIIE) found reasonable basis to believe the expulsions amount to deportation or forcible transfer as a crime against humanity under Article 7(1)(d) of the Rome Statute, characterising them as ‘both widespread and systematic’ and part of ‘a state-wide campaign to disenfranchise and exclude’. Deportation was further identified as one of the inhumane acts constituting apartheid under Article 7(1)(j), with the Panel concluding that the measures documented in Assam are ‘directed towards building conditions for ethnic cleansing’.
Three developments during the period sharpen that assessment. The Supreme Court has now articulated the domestic standard—citizenship determination must be ‘fair, lawful and reasoned’—that the documented practice fails. Human Rights Watch and other independent media outlets added a credible evidentiary record, framing the expulsions against India’s obligations under the ICCPR and ICERD, including the prohibition of deprivation of citizenship on grounds of descent or national or ethnic origin. And the central government has stated the governing legal standard itself: in an affidavit to the Supreme Court reported on 1 August, the Ministry of Home Affairs said that a person whose nationality is unverified can be deported only upon confirmation of nationality and acceptance by the receiving country, and that ‘the deportation procedure cannot be initiated without nationality verification’. The nightly operations documented on the Bangladesh border satisfy none of these conditions—by the government’s own standard, stated under oath.
- During the reporting period, India continued to witness escalated levels of ‘top’ and ‘intermediate’ levels of hate speech targeted at religious minorities, particularly Muslims. (‘Top’ level hate speech is prohibited by international law, constituting direct incitement to hostility, discrimination, or violence; ‘Intermediate’ level hate speech may be prohibited by States—and is prohibited by India—to protect the rights or reputations of others, or for the protection of national security or of public order, or of public health or morals. See UN guidance here.)
- Much of the latest wave was concentrated in West Bengal, where the BJP won its first-ever victory in the state’s assembly elections on 4 May, and where the incoming government’s most senior leaders continued the anti-Muslim rhetoric of their campaign from constitutional office.
Across states, the nationwide campaign against so-called ‘illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators’ (see sections on Forced Expulsions and Refoulement and Disenfranchisement and Denationalisation) remained the dominant theme of official rhetoric. With polls in Assam, West Bengal and elsewhere completed in April, the spike in campaign-rally hate speech documented in the previous edition of this Tracker receded during the latest reporting period. - West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, on 5 May—a day after the results, and four days before he was sworn in—declared the outcome “a victory for Hindutva”, stating that “Muslims voted for Mamata Banerjee, who wears a hijab”—Banerjee being the outgoing Chief Minister he defeated—while “Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists blessed me”, and summarising the electorate as “Hindu EVM BJP, Muslim EVM TMC” (an EVM is an electronic voting machine; the TMC, or Trinamool Congress, is the defeated ruling party). The same day, he called Muslims “kattarwadi” (hardliners) and said he would “work for the Hindus of Nandigram”, since, he asserted—without any source, as India’s Election Commission publishes no religion-wise voting data—the entire Muslim vote had gone to his opponents.
On 12 May, days after Adhikari was sworn in, The Wire published an analysis of his public statements between 2021 and 2026, documenting a systematic pattern of statements inciting hatred against Muslims: a December 2025 demand that India’s “100 crore [one billion] Hindus” teach Bangladesh “a lesson like Israel taught Gaza”; a warning to Hindus against a health-outreach programme on the conspiratorial ground that its medicines “can lead to birth control” so that “Hindus become a minority”; a videotaped call to “completely separate out these jihadi fundamentalists” village by village; the public felicitation of three men who had assaulted Muslim street vendors; and the routine use of ‘Bangladeshi’ and ‘Rohingya’ as slurs—including against sloganeering opposition workers he dismissed on polling day as “all Bangladeshi Muslims”. West Bengal has India’s second-largest Muslim population share, at 27 per cent.
In office, on 20 May, Adhikari announced that his government would follow the central government’s ‘detect, delete and deport’ framework and instructed police that detained ‘infiltrators’ would no longer be produced in court but handed directly to border forces (see section on Forced Expulsions and Refoulement). After violence in Baruipur district in July, he attributed a lynching to “Moulobadis” (radical fundamentalists), “Anti-National Elements” and “deleted people in SIR”—the voter-roll revision that has disproportionately removed Muslim names (see section on Disenfranchisement and Denationalisation)—and after the arrest of 13 Muslims among 14 protesters in Kolkata in late July, he called protesters “those Friday people”, an explicit religious code for Muslims, named only Muslim-majority neighbourhoods as sources of trouble, and pledged to “drive these anti-nationals out of Bengal” (see section on Arrests and Detentions). - Union Home Minister Amit Shah, addressing the BJP’s newly elected West Bengal legislators in Kolkata on 8 May, described the party’s victory as “fixing the biggest hole in the country’s national security”, pledged that “infiltration and cow smuggling will become impossible in West Bengal”, and vowed to identify and expel every “ghuspaithiya” (infiltrator) and make the country “ghuspaithiya-mukt” (free of infiltrators).
In a communication to the Indian government dated 1 May, three UN Special Rapporteurs noted that the Home Minister had publicly framed mass voter-roll deletions as targeting ‘illegal Bangladeshi immigrants’—”rhetoric that conflates legitimate Indian Muslim citizens with foreign nationals”—and had presented the exercise to Parliament “in terms of the removal of a religious community, expressed through the policy formula ‘Detect, Delete and Deport’”. The Special Rapporteurs stated that such statements by senior government figures could amount to incitement to discrimination within the meaning of the ICCPR. The government’s 60-day window to respond lapsed without a reply, and its eventual acknowledgment in Parliament did not address the incitement finding (see section on Disenfranchisement and Denationalisation). - Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, speaking in Lucknow on 18 May—days before the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha—declared that namaz (Islamic ritual prayer) would not be permitted on roads: “If you want to offer namaz, do it in shifts… but not on roads”—adding, “If you (Muslims) don’t have space in your homes, then control your population… why are you increasing your numbers if you don’t have the capability… start following the rules and regulations if you have to live within the system”, and closing with a warning: “If they agree peacefully, it is fine; otherwise, other methods will have to be adopted… People in Bareilly tried testing the system and saw the result.” He posted the clip to his more than 32 million followers on X. A close textual analysis by The Wire noted that the speech singled out Muslim prayer without once using the word ‘Muslim’, converted a civic framing—’roads are for people’—into a demographic one, and made belonging conditional: a section of citizens “must constantly prove their compliance”. (The enforcement of the prayer restrictions is documented in the section on Religious Freedom.) On 9 June, at a religious festival in Lucknow, Adityanath warned against ‘love jihad’ and ‘land jihad’—fabricated conspiracy theories alleging that Muslims seduce Hindu women and systematically acquire land to alter India’s demography—describing ‘love jihad’ as “a conspiracy to change religious demography”, and declared that “India’s land cannot be a dharamshala [refuge] for invaders or those who have no loyalty or respect for its values.”
- Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma—whose sustained rhetoric against Bengali-origin Muslims, documented in the previous edition, included the pledges to “make the Miya people suffer” and to “break the very backbone of the Bangladeshi Miyas” (‘Miya’ is a derogatory term in Assam for Bengali-origin Muslims, whom the state’s official narrative casts as undocumented immigrants)—was re-elected in May. On 27 July he posted on X: “Our Detect, Delete, Deport mechanism is underway to secure Assam’s interests. Thirteen individuals have been identified, and appropriate action has been taken to deal with them in accordance with law.” (His government’s expulsion operations are documented in the section on Forced Expulsions and Refoulement.) On 26 May, a Delhi court sought responses from Sarma and the Delhi Police on activist Harsh Mander’s petition seeking an FIR (First Information Report—the police complaint that formally opens a criminal investigation) over his remarks urging that ‘Miyas’ be ‘troubled’ and boasting of voter deletions. And before the Gauhati High Court, in petitions brought by prominent Assamese citizens over the same body of remarks, Sarma argued in an affidavit that the allegations rested on “selective extracts” of his interviews; the court directed that full transcripts be placed on record. The petitions also cite the video posted by the BJP’s official Assam account in February depicting Sarma firing at images of Muslim men at point-blank range, captioned “No mercy” and “There is no forgiveness to Bangladeshis”—which Sarma subsequently said he would repost, relabelling the figures ‘Bangladeshis’.
- Other ruling-party officeholders—including state ministers and members of state legislative assemblies (MLAs)—continued to deliver explicitly anti-Muslim speeches at public events:
Maharashtra minister Nitesh Rane delivered at least four documented hate speeches in May alone. At Hindu nationalist gatherings in Mumbai’s Chandivali (3 May) and Pune (9 May), he called Muslims “green snakes”, claimed they are “born to do jihad” and aim to turn India into an Islamic state by 2047, invoked an expanding list of conspiracy theories—’love jihad’, ‘land jihad’, ‘corporate jihad’, ‘halal jihad’—and called on Hindus to buy from and employ only Hindus (see section on Discrimination in Access to Economic, Social & Cultural Rights). At a third event in Mumbai on 14 May he rejected religious coexistence outright: “There is no brotherhood and no equal respect for all religions. Whoever believes in this should go to Pakistan.” On 25 May he suggested Muslims celebrate a “virtual Bakra Eid”—that is, forgo the animal sacrifice central to Eid al-Adha—and called madrasas (Islamic schools) “not educational institutions but… bases for terrorists”.
Uttar Pradesh cabinet minister Sanjay Nishad, at a party meeting in Hamirpur on 20 May, said: “Muslims should return home. If they have allergy to Hinduism, they can adopt Buddhism.”
Assam minister Jayanta Mallabaruah, the legislator for Nalbari district, publicly termed a killing there ‘love jihad’. On 31 May, a Muslim man allegedly killed a student leader and grievously wounded the leader’s 17-year-old cousin; he was himself shot dead by police within 24 hours of arrest, as protest groups raised ‘revenge for love jihad’ slogans, and Mallabaruah adopted the framing. When the girl died of her injuries on 4 July, he repeated the framing, urging “every conscious citizen to be vigilant against such social sickness that has started to spread in our society”. Police have confirmed no such motive; the family attributed the attack to the accused’s rejected romantic pursuit of the girl.
West Bengal BJP MLA Ritesh Tiwari, on 12 May, days after the new government took office, pledged on camera to withhold constituency services from Muslims for five years: “I am the first candidate in 74 years who did not get a single Muslim vote… With Baba Bholenath [the Hindu god Shiva] as my witness, I won’t do any work for them. Not one certificate.”
Rajasthan BJP MLA Balmukund Acharya, at a celebration of the party’s Bengal victory in Jaipur on 4 May, claimed that ‘Bangladeshi ghuspaithiya‘ and Rohingya had entered India through West Bengal on fake documents and would now be “sent back”; on 7 May, at a religious gathering, he fearmongered about demographic change—”chacha [uncle, here a coded reference to Muslim men] has four wives and thirty-six children”—and urged Hindus to have more children.
Assam minister Jayanta Mallabaruah, the legislator for Nalbari district, publicly termed a killing there ‘love jihad’. On 31 May, a Muslim man allegedly killed a student leader and grievously wounded the leader’s 17-year-old cousin; he was himself shot dead by police within 24 hours of arrest, as protest groups raised ‘revenge for love jihad’ slogans, and Mallabaruah adopted the framing. When the girl died of her injuries on 4 July, he repeated the framing, urging “every conscious citizen to be vigilant against such social sickness that has started to spread in our society”. Police have confirmed no such motive; the family attributed the attack to the accused’s rejected romantic pursuit of the girl.
- Yati Narsinghanand, an Uttar Pradesh-based priest with a long record of genocidal rhetoric, convened a ‘Hindu Mahapanchayat’—a communal mass assembly—at Ghaziabad’s Dasna Devi temple on 21 June, where his aide Anil Yadav called for the “annihilation” (sanghar) of Muslims: “Whoever does it first will win this battle.” In a video that drew outrage in the days that followed, Yadav declared: “Islam’s end will come through genocide, and whoever starts it first will be victorious.” On 25 June, Narsinghanand publicly endorsed the remarks, invoking Gaza: “Israel is bombing Muslims in Gaza. That is why Israelis and Jews are peaceful… I fully support Yadav’s remarks, and any action that is taken against Yadav should first be initiated against me.” No police action against either man had been reported by the close of the period. Statements of this character—direct and public calls for the physical destruction of a religious group—engage the prohibition of direct and public incitement to commit genocide under the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute.
- T.G. Mohandas, a Kerala Hindu nationalist ideologue who formerly headed the BJP’s state intellectual cell, said in a YouTube video on 26 July that he “would have shot” the students protesting at Jantar Mantar, the designated protest site in central New Delhi (see section on Shrinking Civic Space and Democratic Backsliding): “I will impose a curfew in about a 4 square kilometre area around Jantar Mantar… After that, I will shoot. Some may die, some may suffer disabilities.” In a second video he said of secular women protesters that “there are women who like being raped, especially leftists”. On 28 July, the Home Minister of Kerala—a state governed by the opposition—ordered a police investigation, and on 29 July the Thiruvananthapuram cyber police registered a case against him for provocation with intent to cause riot and publication of statements likely to create fear or alarm. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) publicly distanced itself, stating that Mohandas—the former general manager of an RSS-affiliated publisher—”is not an RSS official at any level”.
The RSS itself—the ideological fountainhead of India’s Hindu nationalist movement, of which the BJP is the political wing, and whose offshoots the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal are implicated in violations documented throughout this Tracker—faced mounting international scrutiny in its centenary year.
In November 2025, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a bipartisan federal body, had found that the RSS “has been involved in acts of extreme violence and intolerance against members of minority groups for decades” and recommended targeted sanctions against the organisation and its leaders. In April 2026, RSS General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale toured the United Kingdom (including Chatham House and a cross-party dinner with members of Parliament), the United States (including the Hudson Institute) and Germany (including think tanks advising the federal government) to “dispel certain misgivings”—outreach that the founder of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, Raqib Hameed Naik, described as “damage control” and “a knee-jerk reaction to the USCIRF recommendation”. In May, Naik testified before USCIRF that the persecution of India’s minorities “bears the sanction of the country’s top political leadership” and is implemented through “the militant networks of the Hindu nationalist movement”, naming the RSS, Bajrang Dal and VHP, and recommending Global Magnitsky sanctions against all three.
At the same USCIRF hearing, Stephen Rapp—the former US war-crimes ambassador who prosecuted the media architects of the Rwandan genocide—told the Commission that the BJP-Assam ‘Point Blank Shot’ video reminded him of the Hutu Ten Commandments’ “No pity for the Tutsis”, published three years before the genocide; the Panel of Independent International Experts he co-chairs found in March that Sarma’s description of Bengali-speaking Muslims as existential threats “appears to be preparing the ground for ethnic cleansing”.
In June, Karnataka’s Home Minister—in another opposition-governed state—wrote to RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat asking on what legal basis an organisation claiming over 60,000 shakhas (branches) “continues to function with anonymity and without being formally registered as a legal entity”—the RSS is registered under no statute, files no public accounts, and is treated by tax authorities as a ‘body of individuals’; Bhagwat replied that the organisation “is not secretive” and owed no such compliance. And the Karnataka High Court, hearing one of nearly a dozen FIRs against senior RSS functionary Kalladka Prabhakar Bhat—this one over remarks about Muslim women’s birth rates—remarked to his counsel on 4 June: “Without venom, you speak. Why give rise to complaints after complaints?” A fresh FIR over another anti-Muslim speech was registered against the 83-year-old on 2 June.
- The Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH)—the research group whose India Hate Lab project documented 1,318 in-person hate speech events in 2025, as reported in the previous edition—published Profiting from Hate Music on 15 June, mapping India’s ‘Hindutva pop’ industry: 523 songs hosted on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and Meta’s Music Library that violate the platforms’ own policies, half of them directly threatening or inciting violence against religious minorities. On YouTube alone the songs had been viewed more than 198 million times. Advertisements for 103 brands, including major global technology companies, appeared on the videos, monetising the content for platform and creator alike. The report also measured the platforms’ enforcement of their own rules: of a sample of 225 songs reported to the four platforms in October 2025 for content-policy violations, 207—92 per cent—remained live in May 2026, a takedown rate of 8 per cent. “Hate music is one of the oldest and most dangerous instruments of mass violence, and we have seen where it leads, from Rwanda to Myanmar,” said CSOH’s executive director, Raqib Hameed Naik.
- On 12 May, the Union Home Ministry blocked Karnataka’s Hate Speech and Hate Crimes (Prevention) Bill—the country’s one legislative attempt to strengthen the law against hate speech, passed by the opposition-governed state’s legislature in December 2025—stating in an official memo that its provisions were “already substantially covered” under India’s penal code and that “the existing legal framework is adequate to address the concerns”. The state’s governor had earlier withheld assent and reserved the Bill for the President. The Bill prescribed imprisonment of one to seven years for hate crimes, including hate speech.
- Repeat hate speech offenders, at all levels, continued to evade accountability.
On 29 April, the Supreme Court held that no cognisable offence—one serious enough that police may register a case, investigate and arrest without a court’s prior authorisation—was made out against BJP leaders Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Verma over their January 2020 speeches—delivered days before communal violence in Delhi killed 53 people, mostly Muslims—in which Thakur led the chant ‘desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalon ko‘ (shoot the traitors to the nation) and Verma warned that protesters “will abduct and rape your daughters”. The Court found the speeches “were not directed against any specific community”; the previous edition of this Tracker had reported the Court merely declining to hear challenges concerning the same leaders—this quarter it exonerated them on the merits. The complainant, whose challenge to the police report exonerating the leaders was never answered by any court, wrote that the ruling “legitimises a form of coded incitement”.
The Supreme Court’s own 2023 directives requiring states to register hate speech cases suo motu—without awaiting complaints—remained unheeded across the country; the September 2024 UN Special Procedures allegation letter that found speeches by India’s most senior officials “likely to lead to further hostility, discrimination and potentially violence” against Muslims remains unanswered. Not one of the ruling-party officeholders whose speeches are documented in this section has faced criminal prosecution, disciplinary action, or meaningful institutional sanction of any kind. (See section on Lack of Effective Remedy.)
During the period under review, the BJP-led central and state governments further intensified restrictions on the religious freedom of minorities, particularly Muslims. The period saw two more states—Assam and Madhya Pradesh—enact Uniform Civil Codes that override Muslim personal law while exempting tribal communities, with three more states beginning drafts; a High Court declare the centuries-old Kamal Maula Mosque in Madhya Pradesh a Hindu temple and end Friday prayers there; continuing selective demolitions of Muslim religious structures across at least eight states; an intensified criminalisation of Muslim worship and religious observance from Uttar Pradesh to West Bengal; and new central foreign-funding rules stripping ‘proselytisation’ from permitted religious activity, alongside a national law criminalising insults to the song Vande Mataram. Hindu extremist groups, in parallel, escalated campaigns to claim and vandalise Muslim and Christian places of worship.
The developments documented above raise serious concerns under international human rights law as well as domestic constitutional guarantees relating to religious freedom. The right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion—including the freedom to manifest one’s religion in worship, observance, practice and teaching—is protected under Article 18 of the ICCPR, to which India is a party. Any limitations on this right must be prescribed by law and necessary for the protection of public safety, order, health, morals, or the fundamental rights of others; they must not be applied in a discriminatory manner, and the ICERD separately guarantees the enjoyment of this right without distinction as to ethnic or national origin. The patterns documented above appear to fall well outside these permissible limitations.
During the period under review, BJP-governed state authorities and the new government in West Bengal intensified discrimination against Muslims in access to housing, welfare, education, employment and cultural life. This included continuing punitive and arbitrary demolitions and forced evictions across at least ten states—as the Supreme Court stepped back from enforcing its own 2024 safeguards; a six-week programme in West Bengal that tied food rations and women’s income support to citizenship screening, removed 77 Muslim communities from reservation lists, cut the minority-affairs budget by 62 per cent and placed the state’s madrasas (Islamic schools) under survey and inspection; the demolition of family homes, the freezing of digital livelihoods and the summary dismissal of public employees as instruments of collective punishment in Jammu and Kashmir; organised economic boycotts of Muslim traders and workers, including a manufactured ‘jeans jihad’ conspiracy that emptied a Delhi manufacturing hub; an intensifying crackdown on Muslim educational institutions in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh; continuing discrimination against Muslim students and employees in schools, examinations, hospitals and public employment; and campaigns to erase Muslim names from towns, streets and public institutions.
During the reporting period, international assessments continued to register the decline of civic freedoms in India. The Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, released on 3 May, placed India at 157 of 180 countries—in the ‘very serious’ category, down six places from the previous year. The CIVICUS Monitor, which tracks civic freedoms across 198 countries, reaffirmed India’s rating of ‘Repressed’, its second-worst category.
Notable developments and continuing trends during the period included:
- Crackdown on nationwide youth-led protests: On 16 May, days after the Chief Justice of India was reported to have compared unemployed young people to “cockroaches”, a communications strategist founded the ‘Cockroach Janta Party’ (CJP)—a satirical online campaign, not a registered party; within a week its website, which one million people had joined, was taken down by the government, and its Instagram and X accounts were hacked or withheld. From 6 June, the campaign led a sit-in at Jantar Mantar, the designated protest site in central New Delhi, demanding the education minister’s resignation over the leak of the question paper for NEET, the national medical entrance examination. The government blocked the Telegram messaging application nationwide—used by an estimated 150 million people in India—for six days from 17 June, citing the platform’s alleged role in the leak. The protest swelled after police forcibly hospitalised the activist Sonam Wangchuk—whose detention under the National Security Act—a preventive-detention law permitting imprisonment without charge or trial for up to twelve months—in a separate case was documented in earlier editions of this Tracker—on 18 July, three weeks into a hunger strike at the site. On 20 July, a crowd that police sources put at 50,000 or more marched towards Parliament and was met with baton charges, tear gas and pellet-gun fire—reported as the first use of pellet guns against protesters in the national capital—leaving at least 100 students injured, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of peaceful assembly, whose statement of “profound concern” also recorded the use of electric shocks and the presence of unidentified non-state actors operating alongside the police. (The injuries, the Special Rapporteur’s findings, and the calls by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International for an independent investigation are documented in the section on Torture and Ill-Treatment; the selective arrest of Muslim protesters across at least six states is documented in the section on Arrests and Detentions.) On 25 July, the Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General addressed the crackdown: “It is important that people wishing to protest peacefully be allowed to do so without the fear of harassment, the fear of arrest, or the fear of injury.”
Mobile internet around Jantar Mantar was suspended repeatedly—about five times from 17 July, latterly across a 1.5-kilometre radius of central Delhi, with signal jammers reported at the site and metro stations shut. When protesters adopted BitChat, an application that passes messages between phones over Bluetooth without needing the internet, the Home Ministry ordered GitHub, the code-hosting platform, to delete the application’s code—on 23 July, on three hours’ notice. The Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital-rights watchdog, called the order “unconstitutional and authoritarian”: it identified no unlawful message, objecting instead to the tool’s capacity to let citizens “speak to one another while [the government] has switched the internet off”. Delhi Police separately ordered social media platforms to remove posts about the Prime Minister, identifying 450 accounts. Police also ran protest-site footage through AI-aided facial recognition—via a mobile surveillance vehicle and smart glasses—matching protesters’ faces against police databases; petitions before the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court, citing the police’s own disclosures that no privacy impact assessment was conducted and that an unvalidated 80 per cent similarity score is treated as a positive match, seek to have the biometric surveillance of a peaceful assembly declared unconstitutional. On 15 July, Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor—a centrally appointed official—renewed the Police Commissioner’s authority to order preventive detention under the National Security Act for three months from 19 July. Police described the authorisation as a routine quarterly renewal decided before the protests escalated.
A truck loaded with stones, filmed parked at Jantar Mantar hours before the 20 July march and cited in claims that protesters had stockpiled projectiles, turned out to have been in Delhi Police custody since 16 July, seized in a road-accident case; police called any suggestion of a conspiracy “baseless”. A second police-station diary entry emerged showing that a Deputy Commissioner of Police, exercising magisterial powers, had authorised the paramilitary Rapid Action Force in writing to disperse the assembly using “gas/lathi [baton] charge/fire arms”—even as the government press bureau’s denial that pellet guns were used at all remained unretracted. Between 20 and 26 July, Republic TV, a leading pro-government channel, recast the movement on prime-time television as a foreign plot: a Massey University white paper that analysed 25 of its broadcasts and 58,941 words of its coverage that week found the protest narrated as a CIA-directed conspiracy, with a digital-safety guide published by the Internet Freedom Foundation recast on air as a criminal “toolkit”.
On 25 July, the education minister resigned—the protest’s central demand. The Supreme Court, while allowing investigations against protesters to proceed, directed that no coercive action be taken against protesting students and that detained minors be released. Bihar and Assam announced on 27 July that they would release detained protesters and withdraw cases; Maharashtra ordered the withdrawal of 20 FIRs (First Information Reports—the police complaints that formally open criminal investigations) in which more than 1,000 people had been booked; and West Bengal withdrew its own FIR against 16 arrested protesters on 28 July and stated that no coercive measures would be taken against students, though all four states carved out persons with ‘criminal antecedents’.
On 29 July, CIVICUS placed India on its Monitor Watchlist of countries experiencing severe declines in civic freedoms—alongside Bahrain, Burkina Faso, Ecuador and Georgia—citing the 20 July crackdown by name: “When human rights defenders can spend years entangled in legal proceedings for their activism,” its researcher observed, “the process itself becomes a form of punishment.” - Escalating restrictions on civil society organisations through foreign-funding rules: On 22 June, the Home Ministry notified amendments to the rules under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA)—the law that governs the foreign funding on which much of Indian civil society depends. Organisations must now register purpose-by-purpose from a government-prescribed list and state-by-state, disclose their social media accounts and all publications by their functionaries, and face fines of up to 30 per cent of any sum spent outside their approved purposes or territories; several permitted categories are qualified with exclusions of ‘political’ or ‘ideological’ content. The rules operate on a sector already devastated: more than 18,000 organisations have lost their FCRA registration since 2015, against 14,456 that remain. CIVICUS called the amendments “part of a sustained effort to squeeze independent civil society”. (The exclusion of ‘proselytisation’ from permitted religious activity is documented in the section on Religious Freedom.)
- Continuing censorship of films, books and curricula: On 3 July, the streaming platform ZEE5 released Satluj, a film on the human rights defender Jaswant Singh Khalra, who documented the Punjab Police’s secret cremations of thousands of victims of extrajudicial killing during the counter-insurgency of the 1980s–90s, and was himself abducted and murdered by police officers in 1995. Within 48 hours the film was pulled from the platform’s India catalogue, with officials citing “security grounds” and referring it to an inter-departmental committee. The film had reached streaming—which requires no certification, as the government itself told Parliament in December 2025—only after India’s film-certification board blocked its theatrical release for years, demanding successive rounds of cuts, ultimately between 120 and 127: among them the removal of Khalra’s name, the toll of 2,097 unaccounted cremations he documented, and the phrases ‘extra-judicial killings’ and ‘human rights’. Its 2023 premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival had been blocked, reportedly after diplomatic pressure. More than fifty journalists and film critics condemned the removal as “executive overreach”; Sikh bodies organised community screenings in gurdwaras (Sikh houses of worship) across Punjab.
In July, the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the government’s textbook body, released a revised Class 8 textbook that entirely removes its chapter sections on judicial corruption and court backlogs, after the Supreme Court had ordered the original seized as a “conspiracy to malign the judiciary”. In June, Penguin Random House India declined to distribute the acclaimed graphic journalist Joe Sacco’s book on the 2013 Muzaffarnagar anti-Muslim violence, and YouTube removed Anand Patwardhan’s National Award-winning 1995 documentary on anti-Muslim violence—a film India’s Supreme Court once ordered the state broadcaster to air in the public interest—citing ‘violent content’. In Jammu and Kashmir, after the BJP accused the territory’s elected civilian government of promoting ‘academic jihad’, two books were withdrawn from school libraries, eight officials were suspended, a publisher was raided under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act—India’s principal counter-terrorism law—and every school was ordered to certify that no book on its premises contains “objectionable” content. (The arrest of three Srinagar publishers is documented in the section on Arrests and Detentions.) - Continuing targeting of journalists and human rights defenders: In Uttar Pradesh, police invoked the National Security Act in May against Satyam Verma, a 60-year-old former journalist, and Aakriti Chaudhary, a 25-year-old history graduate, over a workers’ wage protest in Noida that had turned violent—although Chaudhary, her family says, had been detained two days before the violence occurred; their lawyers say the prosecution’s evidence comprises WhatsApp chats, photographs, and a book recovered from Chaudhary’s home. The Delhi High Court in June quashed the financial-crimes prosecutions of the news portal Newsclick and its founder-editor as “a gross abuse of the process of law”—”not a whisper of any incriminating allegation”—though he continues to face counter-terrorism and foreign-funding cases. In Bihar, the Siwan cyber police issued a takedown notice to X over a journalist’s reporting on the lynching of a Muslim man (see section on Deprivation of Life), calling his posts “objectionable, misleading and fact-less”. In West Bengal, journalists assaulted by a mob while covering a 24 July solidarity rally in Kolkata marched and petitioned the Chief Minister for protection; six FIRs were registered on their complaints. And days after a Norwegian journalist publicly questioned the Prime Minister about human rights during his visit to Oslo, her Instagram and Facebook accounts were suspended.
In Assam, Pranab Doley—a prominent indigenous-rights activist who addressed the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights in 2025—was arrested on 12 July over a protest against a luxury hotel project beside Kaziranga National Park. Granting him bail on 29 July, a sessions judge found no video or weapons evidence for the police’s allegations. The next day, while he was still in jail, the Assam government invoked the National Security Act against him, citing among its grounds “suspicious foreign transactions”.
The violations documented across this edition reveal a pattern of remedy failure that remains structural rather than incidental. At every stage of the accountability process—from the registration of a complaint through to independent oversight—Muslim victims confronted barriers that rendered domestic remedies largely ineffective. Complaints were refused, recorded as something other than a crime, or turned against the victims themselves. Deaths in custody and in ‘encounters’—staged police shootings routinely presented as self-defence—were investigated, if at all, by the same forces implicated in them. Courts intervened repeatedly in individual cases, but no court examined any of the underlying policies or practices, and the Supreme Court moved the enforcement of its own demolition safeguards down a judicial level. Reparation remained exceptional, discretionary and, in the government’s own words, ‘not a precedent’.
The following assessment is organised around the five core elements of the right to effective remedy under international law:
- Access to justice: Effective remedy begins with the ability to file a complaint and have it acted upon without discrimination, intimidation, or inversion. Across the incidents documented in this edition, the first point of contact with the justice system—the police station—repeatedly functioned as a barrier rather than a gateway.
On 19 May, Zaheer Shaikh, a 70-year-old Muslim man arrested in a cow-slaughter case, died in the custody of Vejalpur police in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, having made two dying declarations naming the officers he said had assaulted him. Police recorded the death as an accidental death—an administrative entry that opens no criminal investigation—and refused to register a First Information Report (FIR), the complaint that formally begins a criminal case in India. On 29 May the Gujarat High Court declined to order one, holding that the family must first exhaust the statutory appeal remedies available under India’s code of criminal procedure—the same court having earlier described the police’s stance as a ‘recalcitrant attitude to even register a complaint’. Only on 23 July, two months after the death, did the Supreme Court order an FIR registered—without naming any suspect—to be investigated by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) composed of officers nominated by the head of the same state police force, with a report due after the close of this reporting period. (See section on Deprivation of Life.)
In Kaushambi, Uttar Pradesh, after some 25 to 30 men stormed a Sufi shrine on 9 July and assaulted its caretaker and devotees, police booked four of the shrine’s caretakers on the complaint of a member of the Bajrang Dal, a Hindu nationalist youth organisation, and registered no case against the attackers (see section on Religious Freedom). In Latur, Maharashtra, where three Muslim schoolboys were tied to a pole and beaten in mid-July, police registered the attackers’ theft complaint against the boys first, and booked the assailants only after public outcry (see section on Arrests and Detentions).
In West Bengal, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari instructed police in May that detained ‘infiltrators’ would not be produced in court but handed directly to the border force. In Assam, Mumtaz Begum, a Bengali-origin Muslim woman, was expelled into Bangladesh in mid-June while her citizenship case was pending before the very citizenship tribunal a court had ordered to rehear it. No court examined the legality of the ‘pushback’ practice itself—the physical forcing of detainees across the Bangladesh border without any legal process—during the period. (See section on Forced Expulsions and Refoulement.)
The consolidated Supreme Court challenge to twelve states’ anti-conversion laws—on which notices were issued in February 2026, as documented in the previous edition of this Tracker—likewise saw no hearing, no listed date and no interim relief during the period, while arrests under those laws continued (see section on Arrests and Detentions). - Effective, impartial investigations: The right to remedy requires that investigations into alleged violations be prompt, independent and impartial. Where deaths at the hands of the state were investigated at all this quarter, the inquiry rested with the same forces implicated in them.
At least six Muslim men died in police or judicial custody across six states during the period, and in every case the death was recorded by the authorities as something other than a killing—an unnatural death, an illness, a suicide—with the families’ allegations of torture, extortion and medical neglect left without independent investigation (see section on Deprivation of Life). In May, the Jharkhand High Court, examining 427 custodial deaths recorded in that state alone since 2018, found that 262 had been inquired into by executive rather than judicial magistrates, in breach of the procedure the law requires, and called the scale of non-compliance ‘a profound failure of the constitutional machinery’.
In Jammu & Kashmir, no FIR was registered against any officer over the killing of Arif Hussain, a Muslim autorickshaw driver shot dead by a police unit at a night checkpoint in Doda on 17 July; the only FIR named the civilians present, and the two inquiries ordered—one internal to the police, one by the district administration—had not reported by the close of the period. The magisterial inquiry into a previous such killing, in Ganderbal, promised within seven days, remained unpublished more than three months on. (See section on Deprivation of Life.)
The lynching of Shahzad Ali in Siwan, Bihar, on 30 May produced the quarter’s one instance of investigative machinery moving against its own personnel in a Muslim victim’s case—and, in the same case, of that machinery turning on those who reported it. After the Siwan police chief’s review found that a Sub-Inspector of the Dial-112 police emergency-response service, informed that villagers had detained a ‘suspected thief’, had left Shahzad with the mob rather than take him into protective custody, the officer was suspended for negligence, the contracts of two auxiliary Home Guards were recommended for cancellation, and five of the accused were arrested by 4 June. The same district’s cyber police then issued a takedown notice to the social media platform X over posts about the lynching—including by the journalist Meer Faisal, whose reporting it called ‘objectionable, misleading and fact-less’. (See sections on Deprivation of Life and Shrinking Civic Space and Democratic Backsliding.)
In Bhojpur, in the same state, after police shot dead Bharat Bhushan Tiwari, a 28-year-old upper-caste Hindu man, on 17 June at the end of a livestreamed standoff (see section on Deprivation of Life), the state suspended several policemen, registered a murder FIR naming a Deputy Superintendent of Police and a station chief, and constituted a judicial inquiry commission under a retired High Court judge, who visited the family within days; on 31 July a Special Task Force constable became the first policeman arrested in the case, an internal inquiry having found ‘excessive force’. No comparable machinery—suspension, murder FIR, judicial commission, arrest—was set in motion for any of the Muslim deaths in custody or at checkpoints documented in this edition. - Fair, independent prosecutions and judicial processes: The right to remedy depends on judicial processes that are fair, independent and free from undue delay. The quarter’s record is of anti-terror detention functioning as punishment without verdict—acknowledged as such by the Supreme Court itself—alongside fresh judicial confirmations of impunity for past violence against Muslims.
On 18 May, the Supreme Court questioned its own January 2026 judgment denying bail to the student leaders Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam—detained without trial since 2020 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), India’s principal anti-terrorism law, over the February 2020 communal violence in Delhi in which 53 people, most of them Muslims, were killed—holding that ‘bail is the rule’ is ‘not an empty statutory slogan’ but a constitutional principle, and that the earlier ruling had failed to follow binding precedent. On 22 May, another bench granted six months’ interim bail to their co-accused Khalid Saifi and Tasleem Ahmad after nearly six years—’The process is the punishment,’ Saifi said on his release—and referred to a larger bench the question whether prolonged incarceration should outweigh the UAPA’s bail restrictions. Khalid and Imam themselves, however, were again denied bail in June, in their seventh year of pre-trial detention.
The Kashmiri human rights defender Khurram Parvez, arrested in November 2021—whose detention the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had found arbitrary—was bailed by the Delhi High Court on 10 June after four and a half years in custody, and freed on 18 July when a Delhi court granted bail in the last case against him; the charges stand. In late July, the Supreme Court ordered the release of Mohd Saquib Ansari and Waqar Azhar, jailed for nearly twelve years in a UAPA case in which only 68 of 197 prosecution witnesses have been examined, calling the incarceration ‘grossly violative’ of the right to liberty. And on 12 June, Abdul Qadir, an undertrial—a prisoner held through trial, not convicted—in the 2008 Bengaluru serial blasts case, died in prison after nearly eighteen years, weeks before the Supreme Court’s deadline for the long-reserved verdict; a court order for his treatment outside the prison had gone unheeded. (See section on Deprivation of Life.)
Fresh rulings meanwhile confirmed the impunity that persists in past cases of anti-Muslim violence. On 7 May, the Bombay High Court upheld the acquittal of all 22 accused—21 of them police officers—in the alleged staged-‘encounter’ killings of Sohrabuddin Shaikh, his wife Kauser Bi and the sole witness Tulsiram Prajapati in 2005–06; the federal investigating agency had declined to challenge the acquittals. In early May, the Gujarat High Court upheld the acquittal of five men accused of throwing a Muslim man, Samsuddin alias Kasamkhan, into a fire in Vadodara during the 2002 anti-Muslim violence, for want of identification of individuals in a mob of several hundred. In each instance, the acquittal likely reflected not the innocence of the accused but the prosecution’s failure to build a case capable of identifying anyone at all.
Courts did strike down individual instances of process being used as punishment. On 27 July the Bombay High Court quashed the externment—an order banishing a person from a district—of two functionaries of a Muslim political party over protest-related FIRs, asking ‘How is it anti-national?’ to say that the Babri Masjid, the mosque in Ayodhya demolished by a Hindu extremist mob in 1992, should not have been demolished, and ‘Just because they belong to one religion, action is taken?’; in early May the Madhya Pradesh High Court quashed an FIR against a Muslim schoolteacher booked over an Urdu poem on his WhatsApp status, ordering police protection for him.
- Adequate reparation: Under international law, victims of human rights violations are entitled to restitution, compensation and rehabilitation. During the reporting period, reparation, where it came at all, came late, in part, and without any acknowledgment of wrongdoing.
On 8 July, the last four members of the two Birbhum families whose wrongful expulsion to Bangladesh the previous edition documented returned to India through the Malda border, a year after being pushed across—but the Union government had told the Supreme Court it would bring them back ‘not as a precedent’ to be followed in similar cases. No compensation or acknowledgment of the wrongful expulsion accompanied any return, and return itself remains a discretionary, case-by-case concession. (See section on Forced Expulsions and Refoulement.)
On 6 July, six years after the 2020 violence in Delhi killed 53 people, most of them Muslims, the Delhi High Court refused to recall its January 2025 order directing the government to disburse ₹210 million (approximately USD 2.4 million) in compensation recommended by the riots claims commission. Asked whether it had built any mechanism to recover the money from the perpetrators—on whom, it argues, the liability falls—the government’s answer was ‘not yet’.
In Surat, Gujarat, after around 100 homes in the Muslim-majority settlement of Nasirnagar were demolished on 30 May with no authority accepting responsibility, the Gujarat High Court found the demolition ‘prima facie without any authority of law’, saw five municipal officials suspended, called the state’s response an apparent ‘eyewash’ creating ‘an impression of official complicity’, and pressed for rehabilitation of the displaced families at the personal expense of the officers responsible rather than the taxpayer. (See section on Discrimination in Access to Economic, Social & Cultural Rights.)
On 10 June, the Allahabad High Court issued guidelines against illegal preventive detention in Uttar Pradesh, fixing compensation of ₹25,000 (approximately USD 290) for every day of unlawful detention beyond 24 hours, recoverable from the salaries of the magistrates and police officers responsible, and awarded ₹200,000 (approximately USD 2,300) to Mansoor Ahmad, a Muslim man from Prayagraj held illegally for eight days.
In Jammu & Kashmir, in the last days of July, the government approved the release of ₹4.1 million (approximately USD 48,000) owed to Insha Mushtaq, blinded at 15 by pellet-gun fire through the window of her home during the territory’s 2016 unrest—the balance of assistance sanctioned for her in 2018 that went unpaid through the territory’s eight years without an elected government, arriving a decade after the injury and in the same month pellet guns were fired at protesters in Delhi for the first time (see section on Torture and Ill-Treatment).
- Independent oversight: The right to effective remedy presupposes oversight bodies capable of monitoring state compliance and intervening where violations occur. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC)—the statutory body mandated to perform this function—is absent from the record of this edition: the Commission was not reported to have taken up, of its own motion, any of the custodial deaths, lynchings, expulsions or demolitions documented in this report.
On 18 May, the Allahabad High Court, ruling in a public interest litigation pending since 2010 over the death of a man with a 40 per cent physical disability in a Mainpuri police lock-up in 2009—recorded by police as a suicide by hanging from his own belt—found that version ‘almost an impossibility’, the post-mortem’s knot mark and fractured tracheal rings being more consistent with strangulation. The court faulted itself for letting a custodial-death case pend for sixteen years, the police for ‘passing the buck’ over video evidence whose disappearance ‘perhaps’ indicated concealment of a crime, and the NHRC, which had closed the complaint in 2011 having conducted no independent investigation and accepted the police reports ‘as gospel truth’—the court questioning ‘the very purpose of the institution’ if custodial deaths were disposed of in this manner. In July, on appeals by the Uttar Pradesh government and the then police chief of Mainpuri—now an Inspector General—the Supreme Court stayed all further High Court proceedings.
GANHRI—the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions, which grades such bodies against the UN’s Paris Principles on their independence—had recommended in 2025 that the NHRC be downgraded from ‘A’ to ‘B’ status, a step that would restrict its participation in UN Human Rights Council proceedings; the NHRC’s challenge was rejected in December 2025, and the final decision, originally due in April 2026, stands deferred to November 2026. In March, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International had urged GANHRI members to sustain pressure for reform.
On 16 July, the Supreme Court declined to adjudicate the batch of contempt petitions alleging violations of its own November 2024 guidelines against punitive demolition, remitting them to the High Courts with directions to decide within four months; the previous edition had measured every demolition against those guidelines, and their central enforcement is now devolved. A week later, the one judicial attempt to strengthen the safeguards—an Allahabad High Court judge’s proposal that no accused person’s home be demolished within two years of an FIR—was not endorsed by the second judge on the bench, and awaits a third judge. (See section on Discrimination in Access to Economic, Social & Cultural Rights.)
The government’s 60-day window to respond to the 1 May communication of three UN Special Rapporteurs on the mass deletion of voters from electoral rolls lapsed without reply, and its eventual acknowledgment in Parliament on 30 July addressed neither the disproportionate impact on Muslims nor the finding that official rhetoric could amount to incitement (see section on Disenfranchisement and Denationalisation). And the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of peaceful assembly, in her statement on the 20 July crackdown in Delhi, recorded that when civil society organisations approached the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court seeking protection for students from police violence, ‘both bodies refused to intervene’. Where the aggrieved were a nationwide, non-minority protest movement, by contrast, the machinery of remedy moved in days: the Supreme Court restrained coercive action against protesting students on 28 July, and four states announced case withdrawals within the same week—each carving out persons with ‘criminal antecedents’. (See section on Shrinking Civic Space and Democratic Backsliding.)
The reporting period also provided further confirmation that impunity in India does not merely denote the absence of punishment, but often functions as a pathway to reward and recognition:
- On 19 July, Monu Manesar—the cow vigilante leader bailed in March 2026 in the 2023 abduction and killing of Junaid and Nasir, two Muslim men whose charred bodies were found in a burnt vehicle, and welcomed home with garlands and drumbeats, as the previous edition documented—shared a photograph of himself with the Joint Commissioner of Police, Faridabad, an officer awarded the President’s Police Medal this year. Haryana Police issued no statement; the photograph circulated alongside an earlier video in which Manesar claimed police worked with cow-protection groups ‘day and night’.
- On 29 April, the Supreme Court found no cognisable offence—one serious enough for police to investigate without a court’s prior authorisation—in the 2020 ‘shoot the traitors’ speeches of the BJP leaders Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Verma, exonerating on the merits the men the previous edition reported the Court merely declining to hear; one of them now serves as Delhi’s Deputy Chief Minister (see section on Advocacy of Religious Hatred).
On 12 June, Additional District and Sessions Judge Tabassum Khan, a Muslim woman judge in Madhya Pradesh’s Narmadapuram district, sentenced 14 men to life imprisonment for the 2022 lynching of Sheikh Lala Nazir Ahmed, a Muslim truck driver beaten to death on suspicion of cow smuggling. Hindu nationalist groups burned her effigy, abused her with anti-Muslim slurs and threatened ‘bloodshed’, and a national television editor declared the verdict a ‘judicial lynching’; the Madhya Pradesh High Court had to take cognisance and order police protection for the judge, recording that ‘our judicial officer cannot be threatened merely because he or she chooses to pass a particular order’.
In their report examining alleged violations of international law against Muslims in Uttar Pradesh and Assam, published in March 2026, the Panel of Independent International Experts (PIIE)—a group of prominent jurists and investigators—had concluded that “in both states, the remedial framework appears to be largely ineffective for Muslims, particularly in relation to serious violations, and individuals affected have no realistic prospect of securing justice through existing domestic mechanisms.” The evidence documented across this edition suggests that this conclusion increasingly applies nationally.