The third quarterly review report in 2026 also stated that at least eight Muslims were killed by cow vigilantes and other non-state actors across four states.

West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest number, three each. With two months of the year remaining, 2026 is already the deadliest year for such killings in the IPT’s data, which begins in January 2022.

Uttar Pradesh accounted for 103 of the 146 incidents documented in this edition of IPT. The poll-bound state saw an increase in violence against Muslims alongside the institutionalization of coercive policing and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Police shot more than a hundred Muslim men, most of them under the guise of cattle-related enforcement, and the Chief Minister himself made nearly half of the hate speeches recorded in the state.

State police data released in October showed that 110 of the 316 people killed in Uttar Pradesh ‘encounters’ since 2017 were Muslim—about 35 per cent, in a state where Muslims are about 19 per cent of the population.

Between August and October, police also shot and wounded at least 118 Muslim men in ‘half-encounters’—non-fatal police shootings, usually in the legs, before a formal arrest—105 of them in Uttar Pradesh. Most were accused in cattle cases.

Last month, an Associated Press investigation found that of some 650 people shot by Uttar Pradesh police in cow-smuggling cases since 2020, nearly 93 per cent of those identified were Muslim.

Officers continued to be rewarded for such shootings. On 13 August, ordering a federal inquiry into one of them, the Allahabad High Court noted that all 23 officers involved had been rewarded for their ‘good work’.

Spike in hate in poll-bound states

Dozens of assaults on Muslims were reported in at least ten states, often involving forced chanting of ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (‘Hail Lord Ram’) and other forms of religious humiliation. Christians were also targeted, particularly in West Bengal.

The disenfranchisement and expulsion of Bengali-speaking Muslims, often branded as illegal migrants from Bangladesh, continued on several fronts. By mid-October, the SIR’s third phase, in 18 states and Union territories, had removed over 61 million names from draft voter rolls, taking the total since it began in Bihar in 2025 to over 133 million.

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In at least five states, bulk ‘Form 7’ objections—a form meant for an individual voter to object to a single name on the roll—were filed to have Muslim voters struck off. In West Bengal, the appeals tribunals had decided only 126,194 of 3.83 million appeals by mid-September, leaving those removed without an effective remedy.

On 13 September, Home Minister Amit Shah said the government was discussing a nationwide NRC with its allies, to ‘identify and flush out every single illegal infiltrator from India’. A Home Ministry committee on ‘demographic change’ asked states for 15 years of religion-wise data on births, school enrolment, property transactions and religious structures. Its terms of reference center on illegal immigration, including detention and deportation, and by mid-October it had opened a portal inviting anyone to submit ‘evidence’ of demographic change.

The questionnaire for the 2027 Census, criticized since August, will ask each respondent for their parents’ names, dates and places of birth, and religion. Taken together, the Census would collect the details on parentage that citizenship by birth turns on, as the government plans a nationwide NRC and its committee treats demographic change as a matter of illegal immigration.

Expulsions also rose. By the end of August, Mumbai police said they had deported 1,066 people as Bangladeshis in 2026, more than in all of 2025. In the first order of its kind, the Gauhati High Court, Assam’s highest court, ordered the state government to pay compensation to the families of two women forcibly pushed across the border into Bangladesh, who remain missing.

Chief hate speakers

The Chief Ministers of four BJP-ruled states—Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam and Uttarakhand—made anti-Muslim remarks during the period.

In Uttar Pradesh, the South Asia Justice Campaign’s Election Watch documented at least 29 anti-Muslim hate speeches from August to October, 13 of them by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. On 7 October, he called the coming election an ’80 vs 20′ contest, a remark read as a reference to the state’s Muslims.

During a By-election rally on 1 October, replying to a Muslim Congress MP, Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma said, Those who are born to drink mother’s milk are human beings, and those born to eat biryani are animals.

Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, of the BJP, whose state also faces assembly elections in 2027, in Haldwani on 29 August, said the BJP was not afraid of any maulvi or maulana (Muslim clerics), that the state’s demography would not be allowed to change, and that conversion, encroachment and ‘jihad’ would not be tolerated. On 6 October, defending the SIR, he asked whether infiltrators should get the vote.

BJP-governed states continued to build the legal and administrative architecture of exclusion. At least six mosques in four states were fully or partly demolished in September alone. In West Bengal, the new government ordered 252 madrasas (Islamic schools) closed and took down 5,299 loudspeakers, about 4,200 of them from mosques, by the Chief Minister’s own count.

Anti-conversion laws came into effect in Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra, and the President assented to Uniform Civil Code bills in Gujarat and Assam, overriding Muslim personal law.

In Assam, more than 1,100 families, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims, were evicted in three districts in mid-October. A New Humanitarian investigation counts 20,387 families displaced in at least 33 evictions under Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma since 2021.

Source: maktoobmedia.com