“Killed by police bullets”: Muslims in Haldwani, India, are scarred by deadly conflict.

At about 6:45pm on February 8, Mohammad Arif called his brother Zahid. A mosque and an Islamic school had been razed by government officials in their town of Haldwani in northern India, and violence had broken out. The 52-year-old Arif wanted his brother, seven years younger, to return home immediately from the iron and cement shop he worked in.

Zahid rushed home on his motorbike and parked it outside the house. Unaware that the protest had become violent, Zahid hurried to buy milk for his infant grandchild.

When Zahid’s 16-year-old middle son Mohammad Anas learned that his father had gone out again, he went looking for him in the cramped, dingy lanes of Haldwani’s Banbhoolpura area, a Muslim ghetto. The police shot the son in the stomach in the lane, and the father in the chest 200 metres along the same road.

Zahid and Anas are among at least six people killed, including five Muslims, in clashes that involved mob violence and police firing. At least two dozen civilians and more than 100 police personnel were injured, several police vehicles were burned and a police station was attacked in the fallout from protests in Haldwani, the latest site of government-led demolitions in India targeting Muslim structures.

The town’s municipal authorities bulldozed the buildings called the Mariyam mosque, which could accommodate 500-600 worshippers, and the Abdul Razzaq Zakariya school in Malik ka Bagicha in Banbhoolpura on February 8, saying that they had been built without permission.

Residents said the mosque and the school – built in 2002 – have been unfairly targeted, despite a court hearing on the matter scheduled on February 14. The Quran, other religious books and prayer mats are still buried under the rubble.

When municipal authorities, accompanied by the police and bulldozers, came to demolish the mosque and school, only 25-30 women were inside the compound, said 20-year-old Samreen Khanum, from behind her burqa.

They, and other residents who arrived soon afterwards, tried pressing authorities to not demolish the structures, “The Masjid is our Allah’s home. We can’t see it getting Shaheed (martyred),” said Samreen.

But the demolition started at about 4:30pm. According to the police, residents threw stones at them and set vehicles on fire. The police then hurled tear gas shells and baton-charged the protesters to control the violence.

However, the residents say that police lathi-charged (hit with sticks) the protesting women and tear gassed them, angering the protesters and making some resort to arson. Protesters also surrounded the police station. Samreen said she was fasting and fainted during the teargassing. Her sister, Najma Khanum, 21, was also injured in the police melee.

Both sisters feel that the demolition was politically motivated. “Why is it that only our mosques are demolished every time? If they want to remove encroachment they should remove illegal structures like temples and not just a single mosque and madrasa [school] in a Muslim ghetto,” said Najma.

Last month, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a Hindu temple in the northern city of Ayodhya, built on the site of a centuries-old Mughal-era mosque that was destroyed by Hindu zealots in 1992.

In 2023, the government of the state of Uttarakhand, where Haldwani is based, said it had demolished more than 300 Muslim shrines within 90 days.

Even the minority cell of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules Uttarakhand, where Haldwani is based, and nationally in New Delhi, had protested against plans for the latest demolitions.

“The madrasa is used by poor children and the old offer prayers at the mosque … we are trying very hard to make the minority community get along with our party … Keeping in mind the coming elections and the interest of the party, those structures should not be demolished,” the BJP minority cell, which leads its outreach to Muslims, wrote in a February 3 letter to Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami.

Samreen and Najma are now worried about their 18-year-old brother Mohammad Ayan, who went out to sell vegetables on his cart on February 8 when the violence broke out. Four days later, they have still not found him.

“We only know that six people have been killed. We don’t know if it’s our brother or friend. They aren’t letting us near the bodies or allowing us to identify them. Many of the bodies are left unclaimed. They have cut the internet and we can’t even check the names of the killed,” Samreen said.

When Zahid’s eldest son, 22-year-old Mohammad Aman, learned that his father and younger brother had been shot, he and a friend went out to retrieve their bodies. “Even after shooting my brother, policemen beat him with a baton. He attempted to shield his father’s body by lying on it but they beat him with the butt of a rifle,” Aman said.

Zahid had already died when Arif, who lives 500 metres away, arrived at his home, but his nephew was drenched in blood but still breathing. He claims police barred them from taking Anas to hospital. “If they had allowed us to take him to the hospital, my nephew would be alive,” he said, tearing up. The family attempted to stem the flow of blood with cloth and cotton borrowed from neighbours.

While the police claim that their response was driven by violent attacks on them by protesters, the families of many of those killed insist their relatives were not even involved in the protests.

“My father went to buy milk and my brother went to look for him,” said Aman, Zahid’s son who tried to rescue his father and brother. “So why were they killed?”

Following the incident, authorities in Haldwani issued shoot-on-sight orders, imposed a curfew, suspended internet services, closed schools, and banned large gatherings – even for Jummah prayers in congregation.

The next morning, February 9, at about 9am, an ambulance arrived at Zahid’s house to transport the bodies of Zahid and Anas to the Dr Susheela Tiwari Government Hospital, where they were declared dead and taken to the mortuary, where a postmortem was performed on the bodies.

By 10pm, they had been buried in the presence of five family members as well as police officers. During the burial, Arif said that when they went to bury his brother and nephew, they discovered the bodies of another three people killed during the violence that had been buried in unmarked graves. “They (police) did not allow us to film the funeral with our phones. We were only allowed to use the torch lights on our phones,” he claimed.

Guddu Altaf, 47, who runs a carpentry shop near the city’s cemetery, said families of those killed in the violence contacted him to make wooden planks for the graves. “I made planks for six graves … five for people who were shot and one who died of a heart attack during the violence,” he said.