At least 44 Muslims have been killed in hate crimes across India since the start of 2026, placing the year on track to become the deadliest for the community since documentation began in 2022. This is according to the India Persecution Tracker-2026, released by the South Asia Justice Campaign (SAJC), a think tank monitoring human rights conditions in the region.
The report documents a wide range of violations affecting India’s Muslim minority, including killings, arrests, custodial abuse, demolitions, forced expulsions, and restrictions on religious and political rights. These incidents are concentrated largely in states governed by the BJP.
Of the 44 deaths recorded, 19 were attributed to state actors, primarily police and security forces. The remaining 25 resulted from religiously motivated attacks carried out by Hindutva extremist groups. More than 3,000 buildings, including Muslim homes, businesses, and religious structures, have been bulldozed since January. Authorities routinely justify demolitions as action against illegal construction or criminal suspects, but the SAJC argues the practice bypasses due process and is applied selectively against Muslims.
In West Bengal, the BJP government instructed police to hand detained individuals to border forces without court appearances, claimed 4,800 deportations in its first month, removed 77 Muslim communities from the backward-classes reservation list.