Muslims killed, arrested, die in custody, purged from rolls in 2026’s first quarter: Report

India’s deepening climate of anti-Muslim persecution during the opening four months of 2026 has been laid bare by the latest findings of the South Asia Justice Campaign, whose India Persecution Tracker documented a grim sequence of religiously-motivated killings, custodial deaths, mass arrests and institutional discrimination stretching across multiple states.

According to the tracker, at least 13 Muslims, including two women, a 15-year-old boy and a 65-year-old man, were killed by Hindu extremist non-state actors in hate crimes reported from eight states between January and April, while one further death involved the suicide of the wife of a lynching victim.

Bihar recorded the highest number of fatalities with four killings and one related suicide, while Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh followed closely behind.

The report further alleged that state violence remained deeply entrenched, as at least four Muslims were killed by security agencies during the same period.

In Uttar Pradesh, two Muslim brothers were killed in separate police “encounters” within 48 hours of one another, shortly after Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath publicly demanded “strict action” in the case linked to their pursuit.

In Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim civilian was killed by the Indian Army in what has been described as a disputed encounter, while in Delhi, another Muslim man died in police custody amid allegations of torture and custodial brutality.

The tracker stated that the criminalisation of ordinary manifestations of Muslim faith had intensified with alarming ferocity, as more than 40 Muslims were arrested merely for engaging in Ramadan-related and other religious observances.

Among the documented cases were the arrests of 12 men in UP’s Mohammadganj village for offering Friday prayers inside a vacant house after footage circulated online, while 14 Muslim youths were detained during Ramadan after breaking their fast aboard a boat on the Ganga following a complaint lodged by a BJP functionary alleging that chicken biryani leftovers had been discarded into the river.

The report also alleged that over 56 million voters were removed from electoral rolls across 13 states through the Special Intensive Revision process, with Muslims disproportionately affected, particularly in West Bengal, where, according to the tracker, Muslims accounted for 34 per cent of deletions and up to 95 per cent in certain constituencies.

The report also warned of an escalating architecture of hate speech, accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Himanta Biswa Sarma of deploying incendiary rhetoric that increasingly conflated Bengali-origin Muslims with “infiltrators”.