13 Muslims killed in hate crimes in 2026, four by state actors in India: Report
New Delhi: In the first four months of 2026, at least 13 Muslims were killed by Hindutva Hindu extremists across eight states in India.
According to Kashmir Media Service, at least 13 Muslims, including two women, a 15-year-old boy, and a 65-year-old man, were killed by Hindutva Hindu extremist non-state actors in religiously-motivated hate crimes across eight states, India Persecution Tracker data shows.
The tracker by South Asia Justice Campaign recorded one further death, a suicide by the wife of a lynching victim.
The BJP ruling state Bihar had the highest number of fatalities — 4 killings and one related suicide — followed by another BJP ruled state Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh.
At least four Muslims were killed by state actors during the period. It includes two Muslim brothers killed in Indian police “fake encounters” within 48 hours of each other in Uttar Pradesh, days on the order of BJP Chief Minister Adityanath.
In Delhi BJP ruled state, a Muslim man died in police custody of torture.
IPT also noted that the criminalisation of “peaceful manifestations of Muslim faith” continued during the period under review, with Muslims arrested for acts as routine as offering prayers and breaking the Ramadan fast.
Over 40 Muslims were arrested for Ramadan and other religious observance displays.
This includes 12 men arrested in UP’s Mohammadganj village for offering Friday prayers in a vacant house after a video surfaced on social media. During Ramadan, 14 Muslim youth were arrested after they broke their fast aboard a boat on the Ganga.
They were arrested after a BJP leader filed a complaint alleging they had consumed chicken biryani and thrown leftovers into the river.
The data shows that over 56 million voters were removed from electoral rolls across 13 states through the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), with Muslims disproportionately affected. The tracker noted that 34% of deletions in West Bengal were Muslims, including as much as 95% of exclusions in some key constituencies.
The tracker documented that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi deployed the term ghuspaithiya (infiltrator) across at least six speeches between January and February 2026: at election rallies in West Bengal and Assam, at a BJP party event in New Delhi, and in Parliament.
Indian BJP leader and Home Minister Amit Shah escalated similar rhetoric across at least six speeches during the period, explicitly linking voter roll purges to threatened physical removal.
The worst record remains with BJP ruled Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma who openly admitted that the SIR “targets only Bengali-speaking Muslims” and was “aimed at giving them trouble.”
On 7 February, the BJP’s official Assam account shared an AI-generated video depicting Sarma shooting at Muslims at point-blank range, captioned “foreigner-free Assam” and “why did you not go to Pakistan?” Sarma stated publicly that he would repost the video, this time labelling the figures as ‘Bangladeshi.’
In March, Bellingcat analysed 499 BJP social media posts in Assam and West Bengal and found that nearly two in five met the United Nations’ definition of hate speech, with the largest category targeting Bengali-origin Muslims as ‘infiltrators’.
IPT also highlighted that Manipur witnessed the return of inter-ethnic violence, with at least 15 fresh deaths, including of two children.
“Across the incidents documented in this edition, Muslim victims repeatedly encountered a system in which the first point of contact—the police station—functioned not as a gateway to justice but as a barrier to it,” an overview of the database stated.
In multiple cases, first information reports (FIRs) either omitted the core offence or were filed against the victims rather than the perpetrators.
In February, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions warned of ‘systemic’ policing failures in India, citing credible information of a ‘pervasive pattern of excessive and often lethal use of force by Indian police’, particularly in Uttar Pradesh and Assam, with Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis disproportionately affected.
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