Current Events: Ujjain and the Steady Erosion of Muslim Rights in Modi's India
When the Bulldozer Comes for the Mosque
The demolitions arrive quietly at first — a notice, a deadline, a municipal order about traffic flow. Then come the bulldozers, and then the batons.
In Ujjain, one of Hinduism's seven sacred cities and home to the famous Mahakal temple, authorities have begun removing part of the historic Shahi Masjid. The official explanation is mundane: road widening, part of the city's preparations for the Simhastha, the massive religious congregation that will draw tens of millions of pilgrims to the city in 2028. Historic mosques, it seems, stand in the way of progress.
The scene that accompanied the demolition was anything but mundane. Footage circulating from the site shows several police officers surrounding a single Muslim protester, striking him repeatedly with batons — and continuing to strike him after he falls to the ground. The image is a compact summary of a decade of Indian politics: a Muslim citizen objecting to the erosion of his community's patrimony, met not with dialogue but with state violence, carried out in full view of cameras and in the name of public order.
The Road Widening That Only Runs One Way
Infrastructure has become an unexpectedly revealing instrument of majoritarian politics in India. Again and again since 2014, encroachment-clearance drives, traffic projects, and beautification campaigns have targeted Muslim homes, shops, and places of worship — while equivalent structures owned by Hindus on the same streets remain untouched. In Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath made the bulldozer so central to his governance that the machine itself became a campaign mascot, its image emblazoned on election posters. Entire neighborhoods in Prayagraj, Saharanpur, and Kanpur watched homes of Muslims accused — often merely accused, never convicted — of crimes being reduced to rubble within hours.
The pattern repeated in Delhi's Jahangirpuri in 2022, where demolitions of Muslim-owned structures followed communal clashes and were halted only by a Supreme Court intervention. Critics have a name for it: "bulldozer justice," the substitution of municipal machinery for due process. When the accused are Muslim, the state skips the courtroom entirely and goes straight to the excavator.
Ujjain's Shahi Masjid now joins this long list. The mosque's centuries of history weigh nothing against a road project timed to a Hindu festival; the protester lying on the ground beneath police batons is simply the human cost of keeping that project on schedule.
Citizenship as a Conditional Privilege
The demolition in Ujjain is a local event, but it cannot be separated from the national architecture of exclusion built over the past decade.
The most dramatic example came in December 2019, when Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act. The law created a fast track to Indian citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan — pointedly omitting Muslims. On its face, the CAA is about immigrants. But government ministers had spent years speaking of a companion project, the National Register of Citizens, and the combination was understood immediately: a registry that demands proof of ancestry from every Indian, paired with a citizenship law that offers salvation to everyone except Muslims. As the logic runs, those who fail the paper test and cannot claim the CAA's shelter would face detention or statelessness.
The fear was not theoretical. In Assam, which conducted an NRC under Supreme Court supervision, nearly two million people — a disproportionate share of them Muslim, many of them poor and illiterate — were left off the final list in 2019, cast into a legal limbo of foreigners' tribunals where the burden of proof falls on the accused. Nationwide protests against the CAA-NRC project in late 2019 and early 2020 were met with a ferocious crackdown: police stormed university campuses, and in Delhi, communal violence that killed over fifty people — most of them Muslim — erupted as protests continued.
When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, it provided the pretext to clear the protest sites. The women of Delhi's Shaheen Bagh, who had kept a peaceful sit-in alive through the winter, went home. The citizenship machinery, however, merely paused.
The Loss of Institutional Shelter
What distinguishes the Modi era for India's roughly 200 million Muslims is not only episodic violence but the systematic withdrawal of institutional protection — the slow transformation of the state from a neutral arbiter into something closer to an interested party.
The courts, for decades the last refuge of India's minorities, have delivered a series of blows. In November 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of building a Hindu temple at Ayodhya on the site where the Babri Masjid stood before a mob of Hindu nationalists demolished it in 1992 — a judgment that, whatever its legal reasoning, rewarded the destruction of a mosque with the consecration of a temple. In January 2024, Prime Minister Modi presided over the inauguration of the Ram Mandir at the very spot, an unprecedented merging of his office with a religious ceremony on contested ground. Encouraged by the precedent, claims have been filed over mosques in Varanasi and Mathura, and a lawsuit over mosques across India sits before the courts. Each generation of litigation moves the boundary of the unthinkable a little further.
Legislation has followed the same vector. The 2025 amendments to the Waqf Act restructured the administration of Muslim religious endowments in ways Muslim organizations warned would facilitate the transfer of waqf properties — including, they argued, land attached to mosques — to state control. Muslim lawmakers' objections were overridden; the bill passed on the strength of the government's numbers.
The police, meanwhile, have acquired a reputation for two speeds. When Muslims are victims — of lynchings by cow vigilantes, of pogroms like the 2020 Delhi riots or the 2023 violence in Haryana's Nuh — prosecutions are slow, hesitant, or quietly dropped. When Muslims are accused, bulldozers arrive within days. The baton strikes in Ujjain, continuing after the victim is prone and defenseless, are not an aberration but a routine whose brutality is usually edited out of the official account.
The Background Music of Hate
None of this occurs in a vacuum of rhetoric. Over the past decade, India's Muslims have endured a steady drumbeat of dehumanization from senior political figures and religious leaders — with near-total impunity. A union minister exhorted crowds to "shoot the traitors." A chief minister mused about "killing 100" in retaliation for one. At gatherings of Hindu religious figures, speakers have openly called for genocide against Muslims, advocated economic boycotts of Muslim businesses, and urged crowds to keep weapons at home — and prosecutors have declined to act. Social media, much of it generated from within the ruling party's own ecosystem, circulates conspiracy theories and calls for violence at industrial scale.
The violence has been physical as well as verbal. Mob lynchings in the name of cow protection became a signature atrocity of the Modi years: Mohammed Akhlaq, beaten to death in his home in 2015 over rumors about his refrigerator; Pehlu Khan, a dairy farmer murdered on a highway in 2017 while his killers filmed; Junaid Khan, a teenager stabbed on a train the same year. Karnataka banned Muslim girls from wearing the hijab in classrooms, and the courts let it stand. Muslim vendors have been driven from temple fairs, Muslim homes from mixed neighborhoods.
An Election, and What It Changed
To be fair to the record — a virtue this government rarely extends to its critics — the 2024 general election delivered a partial corrective. Denied an outright majority for the first time in a decade, the BJP was forced into coalition, and some of its allies balked at the most aggressive anti-Muslim measures. The national implementation of an NRC has been conspicuously postponed. Muslims voted in large numbers, and in places like Uttar Pradesh's Sambhal, their political weight proved decisive.
But the fundamental architecture remains. The CAA is law. The Waqf amendments are law. The temples rise where mosques stood. The bulldozers keep their schedules. And in Ujjain, a historic mosque loses a wall to a road project, and a man who objected is beaten to the ground by the very officers sworn to protect him.
The Simhastha of 2028 will be magnificent — widened roads, restored ghats, processions of the devout flowing smoothly past the gap where part of the Shahi Masjid once stood. The pilgrims will not be told what made the road so straight. They rarely are.
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