Concealed under a burqa, 24-year-old Ima Jahan stands outside Bareilly’s Kotwali police station carrying her seven-month-old daughter on one shoulder and a bag full of food on the other. She has been here for four days now. Whenever a policeman comes out for a stroll, she runs towards him with the same question: “When will you release my husband?” Jahan says she has been asking them this since Friday (September 26, 2025), when her husband Guddu, 25, was arrested by the Bareilly police in Uttar Pradesh. A constable shoos her away, saying only his seniors can answer her query. “Can you please let me give him some food? He is hungry,” she pleads as the constable hops on his bike to leave.
Guddu was one of 81 people sent to jail in connection with the violence that broke out after Friday prayers on September 26. It was the fallout of a row that began over an illuminated board that proclaimed ‘I love Muhammad’ during a Barawafat procession in Kanpur, about 260 km from Bareilly, on September 4.
Some people confronted members of the Muslim community, saying the board was a new element in the traditional procession. Guidelines issued by the State government emphasise that only traditional celebrations can be held in religious processions related to festivals. No tweaks are permitted in order to maintain law and order in a State that has seen religious strife. While matters were settled then, they escalated into a row.
Tauqeer Raza Khan, chief of the Ittehad-e-Millat Council, a regional political party, called for a protest against the Kanpur incident after Friday prayers in Bareilly on September 26. Mr. Khan is from the clan of Ala Hazrat, an Islamic scholar who was born in the mid-1800s and started Barelvism, one of the two prominent schools of Islam in India, the other being Deobandi. The next day, Mr. Khan – who has multiple criminal cases registered against him – was arrested along with seven others. “All he wanted was to submit a memorandum to authorities against the injustice against Muslims in U.P.,” says one of his followers.
This was not Mr. Khan’s first run-in with the law. The police had taken him into custody in 2010 during the government led by Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati for allegedly inciting violence after several people were injured during a similar procession to celebrate the festival. The police later gave him a clean chit in the matter.
“We had denied permission for the protest, but followers of the Ala Hazrat Dargah started gathering at the ground near Noumahla Masjid holding placards and raising slogans. The crowd swelled and became violent after some unidentified persons threw stones at the police, which retaliated with a lathi charge,” says Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Bareilly, Anurag Arya.
The police then examined CCTV footage of nearby shops and houses to identify those in the crowd who had marched towards the ground. Within hours, the police picked up scores of people from shops, markets, and homes in Bareilly.
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“Policemen barged into my house at midnight looking for my son. They were all men. When I questioned their entry into my home, they angrily said I should hand over my son to them,” says Reshma, who claims that her son is a minor and was at home when the clash took place.
Her son sits on the floor of a dingy room in the Kotwali police station with no fan or water to drink despite the repressive heat. “Chai bhi pio aur ye sabzi bhi khao (Drink this tea and eat this vegetable),” says a woman constable to Reshma when she requests that the food she has brought be given to her son.
Explaining this remark, Jahan says, “They think that we will feed poison to our men just to trap the police.” She adds that all her family members have fled Bareilly after the police started nabbing people.
The SSP claims that 16 people detained by the police for interrogation were released immediately after their families produced proof of their date of birth.
The Bareilly police arrested one of Mr. Khan’s aides, Tanzeem, after an encounter on September 30. The police say he opened fire on them and they shot him in the leg in retaliation.
A part of a property owned by Mohsin Raza, one of Khan’s associates, in Bankhana was razed using a bulldozer the same day. Bareilly Development Authority officials say it was an “illegal” construction. Eight more “illegal” properties have been identified for further action, all of which belong to Raza and his aides, say officials.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is known as ‘Bulldozer Baba’ or ‘Dada’, often using this as a form of justice.
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A procession takes a turn
On September 4, Muslims decorated a lane in Kanpur’s Syed Nagar to observe Barawafat, also known as Id-e-Milad-un-Nabi, the festival celebrating the birth of Prophet Muhammad. What looked like regular decoration raised eyebrows in the area when a board inscribed with ‘I love Muhammad’ was illuminated in the evening. Locals objected, saying this was never done before.
The FIR, lodged against 11 named and 10-15 unnamed people in Kanpur, states that after objection from locals, the police got the board removed from the entrance of the lane and placed it within the locality. According to the FIR, a few Muslim youth tore posters related to the Hindu religion during the procession the next day. “This led to a brawl, which was controlled by the police immediately,” states the FIR in Hindi.
The accused were booked under two sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita related to promoting enmity on the grounds of religion and deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings by insulting its religion or beliefs, facing punishment up to five years in jail.
Mufti Saqib Adeeb Misbahi, the Shaher Qazi, one of Kanpur’s religious leaders, questions the police’s discretion regarding guidelines for traditional religious processions that have not been codified into law. “Roshni karte hain Barawafat mein. Roshni ka matlab poori gali saja di. Ab us saji gali ki diwal pe ek light wala Muhammad sahab ka board laga dia to isme naya tradition kya hua? (We put up lights for Barawafat. Lighting means we decorate the whole street. What is new about lighting up a street even if it has Muhammad’s name?)” he says.
What happened in Kanpur drew criticism from members of the minority community, with protests soon spreading from U.P. to Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Telangana.
According to a database being compiled by the Association for Protection of Civil Rights, the U.P. police have registered 29 FIRs against scores of named and hundreds of unnamed people in 11 districts since the first week of September. The Uttarakhand police have registered two FIRs over two protests that took place in Dehradun and Kashipur. In Gujarat, FIRs over the row were registered in Godhra, Gandhinagar, and Baroda. In Maharashtra, cases were registered in Byculla.
The highest number of cases was registered in Bareilly, with 10 FIRs lodged in two days against 2,000 named and unnamed people. The city witnessed arrests, detentions, flag marches, barricades at its busiest market, an Internet shutdown, and bulldozer action, all within a week.
Messages of different kinds
Soon after the violence in Bareilly, the Chief Minister in a public speech issued a warning to those “trying to disturb communal harmony”. Drawing a parallel between goddess Kali, who killed the demons Chand and Mund, and the BJP-led government in U.P., Adityanath said “chaos would be crushed” in a similar manner.
Action against miscreants would set an example for generations to come, he said, adding that “even imagining or dreaming of Ghazwa-e-Hind (religious raid of India, a term used by extremists) guarantees a ticket to hell in U.P.’’.
Opposition leaders like Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav and All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen chief Asaduddin Owaisi attacked the Chief Minister, terming him “pro-Hindutva” and “anti-Muslim”.
Meanwhile, BJP supporters while performing Ganga aarti at the Assi Ghat in Varanasi held placards that read ‘I love Mahadev’ that were similar in design to the ‘I love Muhammad’ board.
Aman Sonkar, district president of the BJP youth wing in Varanasi, which is communally volatile due to the ongoing Kashi Vishwanath temple-Gyanvapi mosque row, put up banners that read ‘I love bulldozer’ at major intersections in the city.
Words of caution
In a video message, Kalbe Jawad, Shia leader and general secretary of the publication Majlis-e-Ulama-e-Hind, told Muslim youth that they should learn not to allow political parties to reap benefits from the suffering of their community.
“This is totally a religious matter, yet some political parties are attempting to use it for their own purposes. We must be cautious. The parties trying to exploit this have historically harmed Muslims,” he said.
Syed Sadatullah Husaini, president of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, a socio-religious Islamic organisation, in a message said the Muslim community must remain steadfast, peaceful, and guided by the Prophet’s message of patience, mercy, and compassion. He called upon the government to immediately withdraw the cases, release those wrongfully detained, and restore parity, proportionality, and justice in governance.
Conspiracy and common sense
A motorcycle mechanic whose shop is near Noumahla Masjid, the site where violence broke out in Bareilly on September 26, says the fear of arrest hovers over every Muslim in the area.
The mosque is deserted even at the time of the afternoon namaz. Inside, a dozen policemen sleep, while an equal number of personnel stand guard outside. A ‘I love Muhammad’ poster hangs above the mosque, which is surrounded by shops owned by both Hindus and Muslims.
An elderly Muslim man, who runs a bookshop selling religious books, says he did not attend Friday prayers on the day of the violence. “I went out of town that day and kept my shop closed for three days after that,” he says.
A man in his 50s, who runs a paan shop, says he refrains from wearing a skullcap or keeping any signs in the shop that show that he is a Muslim in order to protect his livelihood. He says he cannot understand why the text on the board that sparked the row was in English. “In Islam, no one can take the name of Muhammad without adding the prefix, ‘Peace be upon him’.”
Ram Sahni (name changed), who sells fruit juice near the Kotwali police station, says, “Why can’t people understand that politicians divide and rule? In this tug of war for power, the ones who get crushed are regular people like me.”
He says he has incurred a loss of over ₹20,000 in three days. With heavy police deployment, there are barely any customers, he adds.
At his shop are Swati and Manisha, college students worried about a project they need to submit by September 30. “There is no Internet in the city since Friday. October 1 is the last day for submission,” says Manisha.
Though Internet services were restored in Bareilly on September 30, the Uttar Pradesh government on October 2 ordered their suspension for 48 hours to maintain law and order in view of Dasara festivities.
