On September 20, in Itaunja on the outskirts of Lucknow, Rizwan was riding his scooter towards Mahona. His FIR says he was carrying buffalo meat for his food business. Near a country-liquor shop on Mahona Road, three men – Rana Yadav, Shanu and Suraj – allegedly intercepted him, caused him to fall and beat him with kicks, fists, lathis and sticks. The complaint says he suffered serious injuries, bled and lost consciousness; his family took him to hospital. The FIR was registered the same day under several provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.
The FIR matters because it is a primary document. It records the victim’s account in his complaint. It also matters because the later official and media description adds an important element: police said the assailants accused Rizwan of carrying prohibited cow meat, the police seized the meat and sent samples to a veterinary officer for examination.The nature of the meat was therefore a matter for verification, not a licence for street punishment. No allegation about meat can authorise private individuals to decide guilt and inflict violence.
This distinction goes to the heart of a larger problem in Uttar Pradesh: not only what happens to minorities, but who gets to define what happened afterwards.The question is uncomfortable but unavoidable. When an incident has a possible communal dimension, should the police version automatically become the authoritative version?It should not. Nor should a victim’s account automatically be treated as proven. A democratic society requires investigation, evidence and due process, not the replacement of one unquestioned narrative with another.
But there is a fundamental asymmetry. The police possess the machinery of the State. A victim may possess little more than a statement, a wound, a phone video and the courage to complain. Our responsibility, therefore, is not to distrust every police officer; it is to scrutinise official accounts rather than treating them as the last word. Recent events in Uttar Pradesh illustrate why.
When Two FIRs Tell Different Stories
In Lucknow’s Pehla Kuan area, two competing FIRs were registered at Chowk police station in the early hours of September 22. One, filed by Mohammad Sufiyan, alleges that the dispute began after his nephew Abdullah was asked to fetch cigarettes and that a crowd subsequently followed them to their home, where Sufiyan says he was assaulted and dragged. The second, filed by Kartikeya Agrawal, gives a different account, alleging that Abdullah and Sufiyan were involved in a confrontation following a collision near a lane behind Kali Ji temple.
The two FIRs establish competing allegations; they do not, by themselves, establish the more serious public allegation that Abdullah was ordered to chant ‘Jai Shri Ram’. That allegation has been made by the family, but does not appear in the FIR narratives available to us. Its omission should be treated neither as proof nor disproof. It is a question for investigation: Was the allegation made at the time? Were there witnesses? Is there CCTV footage? What do medical records, videos, phone records and the accounts of the first responding officers reveal?
Evidence Can Sometimes Speak Louder
There are, however, cases in which the available evidence is considerably clearer. In Etah’sMarehra area, a video circulated showing young men pulling the skullcap from an elderly Muslim man during a procession. Police took suo motu action, detained six youths and initiated proceedings; reports said they later publicly apologised.
The significance lies not merely in the removal of a piece of cloth, but in the public humiliation of a person on the basis of a visible marker of religious identity. At the same time, the police response demonstrates an important point: institutions can act against such behaviour when they respond promptly and when they want to. The democratic demand, therefore, is not hostility towards the police, but equal protection by the police. The same principle applies to disputes over mosques.
Law Must Replace the Street
On September 5, a mosque inside the Saharanpur Collectorate complex was demolished after a local court upheld an eviction order concerning alleged unauthorised occupation of government land. The administration said it was implementing the legal process. The mosque management disputed aspects of the procedure, while reports noted that although the court upheld eviction, it did not expressly order demolition.
Whatever the ultimate legal position, the episode has contributed to a wider atmosphere in which Muslim places of worship are facing heightened scrutiny. Within days, the Mustafa Mosque in Moradabad came under scrutiny over its construction documents, while an inquiry was initiated into the Baba Bahauddin Shah Mosque in Sambhal.Authorities have legitimate powers to examine land titles, building permissions and public property. Religious identity cannot place a structure above the law. But the converse is equally important: religious identity cannot make a structure uniquely vulnerable to administrative suspicion.
Such disputes must be resolved through records, transparent procedures and decisions open to judicial scrutiny. Questions concerning places of worship should therefore be settled through documents and law, not competing crowds, street mobilisation or claims of religious ownership over public space.
Meerut offers another warning. A dispute over construction at a mosque in Kesarganj escalated after a Hindu group announced plans to recite the Hanuman Chalisa at the site, prompting authorities to increase security around the mosque.
Whatever the underlying construction dispute, turning a legal question about a place of worship into a contest of religious assertion is a dangerous path. It shifts the centre of gravity from law to numbers, from adjudication to mobilisation.
The Wider Climate
These incidents should not be artificially bundled together as though they were identical. They aren’t. One concerns an alleged assault over suspected meat; another contains competing FIRs; another involves religious humiliation during a procession; others concern administrative or legal disputes over mosques; and the Meerut case centres on a religious flashpoint around a construction dispute. What connects them is subtler: the increasing vulnerability of ordinary civic life to religious identity.
The data on hate speech adds another layer. India Hate Lab documented 1,318 in-person hate-speech events targeting religious minorities in 2025. Of these, 1,289 (98 per cent) targeted Muslims either exclusively or alongside Christians. Uttar Pradesh recorded 266, the highest number among states in its dataset. These are the findings of an independent monitoring project. They should point to an environment in which anti-minority rhetoric is far from isolated.
Words matter because they can lower the threshold for violence. When a community is repeatedly portrayed as dangerous, impure, disloyal, invasive or criminal, humiliation can become normalised, and violence can begin to appear, to some, as punishment rather than crime.
That is why the Rizwan case deserves more than a routine crime report. If a man is suspected of carrying illegal meat, the State has procedures to establish what the substance is and whether any law has been violated. It does not follow that a private citizen may stop him on a road, beat him and pronounce sentence.If the meat is lawful, the suspicion was false. If it was unlawful, the response was still required to be lawful investigation and prosecution. In either case, the road is not a courtroom, and violence is not justice.
Why Official Narratives Must Also Be Examined
There is another reason for caution about official narratives. On September 29, the Supreme Court quashed the preventive detention of Mulla Afroz in connection with the 2024 Sambhal violence and imposed a ₹10 lakh penalty on the Uttar Pradesh government. The Court found that the detention order relied, among other things, on a custodial confession, undisclosed CCTV material and unverified phone messages that could not lawfully sustain preventive detention.
The case does not prove that police routinely distort communal incidents. It does, however, offer a powerful institutional reminder: State narratives and investigative material must themselves be tested against law and evidence. Perpetrators must be condemned irrespective of who they are.If a Hindu man attacks a Muslim because of his identity, he must face the law. If a Muslim attacks a Hindu for the same reason, he must face the law. If a crowd assaults a person, the crowd cannot acquire moral legitimacy from its religious identity. And if an official suppresses, sanitises or misrepresents facts because of prejudice, that too must be exposedwhether the victim is Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Dalit, Christian or anyone else.
The Constitutional Question
The Constitution does not promise citizens protection according to the popularity of their faith. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law; Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds including religion; and Article 21 protects life and personal liberty. These are not abstract decorations. They are the minimum conditions that allow citizens to live together without fear.
The danger facing Uttar Pradesh is therefore larger than any single assault, mosque dispute or procession. Communalism does not always arrive as a riot. Sometimes it enters through a joke, a slogan, a suspicious glance, a cap pulled from an old man’s head, a rumour about meat, a crowd gathering outside a home, a religious dispute turned into a street spectacleor an official narrative that reduces a disturbing episode to a convenient altercation.
And once citizens begin to believe that religion determines who deserves dignity, safety or even the benefit of the doubt, the constitutional promise has already begun to erode. India does not need competing communal narratives. It needs competing evidence tested through a common law.
Every allegation demands investigation. Every crime demands justice. Every religious dispute demands due process. And communal hatred demands an unwavering defence of equal citizenship.The real test of a democracy is not whether the majority feels secure. It is whether the minority can remain human, visible and equal when the crowd is against it.