24 NOVEMBER 2024 will be forever etched in Nazia’s memory. “I don’t know how he ended up at the mosque—whether he went on his own, or someone took him,” she told us, referring to her brother Ayan, who was one of five people killed during the violence that occurred during a survey carried out at Sambhal’s Shahi Jama Masjid that Sunday. According to the family, Ayan was shot dead. They found out about the incident ten minutes after he left home to go to the hotel where he worked. Nazia was at her in-laws’ home when she received a phone call informing her that he had been taken to a hospital in Moradabad. “He was still alive at that time,” she said. “He died in the ICU.”
The survey was the second at the Shahi Jama Masjid within a week. On 19 November, the day before an assembly by-election in the city, a group of eight plaintiffs—led by Hari Shankar Jain, a pro-Hindutva lawyer, and Rishiraj Giri, a Hindu monk—had approached a local civil court, demanding access to the mediaeval mosque, which, they claimed, had been built on the site of a destroyed temple. The judge, Aditya Singh, heard the matter for around three hours before ordering the survey. Around 6 pm, a five-member team, including employees of the Archaeological Survey of India, arrived at the scene, accompanied by the district magistrate, the police superintendent and other officials. They left the mosque around 8 pm, and the city was placed on high alert, because of fears of communal violence over the issue.
Questions were raised almost immediately about the rushed nature of the survey. “We were not given notice,” Zia-ur-Rehman Barq, the Samajwadi Party MP from Sambhal, whose former assembly seat of Kundarki was being contested the following day, told reporters outside the mosque. “Our reply was not sought. They carried it out in a hurried manner, but there was no emergency or anything urgent.”
The by-election result was declared on 23 November, with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party winning the seat for the first time in 30 years. The following morning, at around 7.30 am, the team returned to resume their work. A large crowd soon gathered at the site, sparking a showdown with the police, who fired bullets and teargas shells. The police have denied using lethal force and maintained that they only used pellet guns. However, speaking outside parliament the day after the violence, Barq alleged that some police personnel had used their personal weapons and set their own cars on fire. The police filed seven first-information reports, accusing Barq and around twenty-five hundred unidentified people of various crimes connected to the incident. They arrested 50 Muslims, including three women and at least one minor. The accused have been denied bail.