The Sangh’s quest for a Hindu holy land

{ONE}

ON A LATE NIGHT in June, the hills of Uttarakhand were tranquil and the small town of Purola asleep, but Mohammad Ashraf was awake. He paced around his house, looking out of the window frequently. Were people roaming outside? Was an attack imminent? He kept watch all night, deliberating whether to flee the town that had been his home for nearly 40 years. “I was very afraid, my kids were crying,” Ashraf told us.

Days earlier, on 5 June, posters had appeared on his shop and the shops of Muslims across Purola warning “all Love Jihadis” to leave the town, signed by a Hindu outfit called the Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan. This was shortly after a massive rally led by Hindu organisations had taken place, to protest what they claimed was an increasing pattern of “love jihad” in the region—a Hindu nationalist concoction that claims Muslim men are luring Hindu women into relationships with the goal of converting them to Islam. Two men, Ubed Khan and Jitendra Saini, one Muslim and one Hindu, had been accused of attempting to kidnap a minor Hindu girl in Purola. The duo was arrested, but it became the basis of a campaign against Muslims—an opportunity the Hindu Right grabbed to launch a public agitation on its long-standing conspiracy theory.

On 29 May, hundreds had gathered for the Hindu rally. They marched across town, chanting “Jai Shri Ram.” The town’s markets had been shut down—including Ashraf’s three-generation-old clothing business. Ashraf said the rally intentionally passed by his home, his family being one of the oldest and most well established Muslim families in Purola. His father had settled there in 1978 and Ashraf was born there. “They came in front of my gate and hurled abuses,” he said. He listed the slogans the crowd chanted during the rally, “Drive away the love jihadis. Drive away the Muslims. Muslim rule won’t be tolerated.” But one slogan stood out, “Muslim mukt Uttarakhand chahiye”—We want a Muslim-free Uttarakhand. Ashraf’s three young children witnessed the demonstration from his window. “After they left, my children were asking me, ‘Papa, why were they abusing us?’ I had no answer. My nine-year-old asked me, ‘Papa, have you done something?’”

As tensions escalated, close to forty Muslim families fled the town. But Ashraf decided to stay. “Why should I leave?” he asked. “Everything I have is here. This is my home. Where else will I go?” He continued, “I thought this is my janambhoomi and karambhoomi”—the land of my birth, land of my toil—“now the day I leave from here will be the day I am wrapped in a funeral cloth. Whether they burn my home, or my shop, or kill me, I will stay here.”

Scarce few made the same decision. Zahid Malik, the Uttarkashi district president of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s minority cell, also ran a garment shop in Purola. “If I, the BJP’s district head, am facing this, what will happen to the ordinary public?” Malik asked. In addition to the larger calls for Muslims to leave, he said he was also personally threatened. “You will be forced out of here. It won’t be good for you. You will be the first made to go,” Malik said people from Hindu right-wing organisations told him. “I can’t even repeat some of the threats we were given.” Any hope of ever returning was buried when the threatening posters were pasted on their shops the next week. “They forgot all our names and the only name they remembered is jihadis,” Malik told us. “All Muslims were turned into jihadis.”

The mobilisation against Muslims was not organic, it was engineered and an open provocation, Ashraf told us. The people leading the charge were from “the RSS, the VHP, the ABVP, the Bajrang Dal, and all these self-styled saints,” he said, referring to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its major affiliates. The campaign spread quickly. Mass rallies, like the one in Purola, also subsequently happened across the region—in the towns of Netwar, Chinyalisaur, Naugaon, Barnigad and Uttarkashi. Markets across the valley had been shut in support of the Purola mobilisation, when these rallies occurred.

What began in Purola was in many ways an attempt at ethnic cleansing. While Purola has received much media attention, the events witnessed there are not new or isolated—almost the exact playbook had been successfully implemented in a nearby town called Naugaon in 2018, and on a smaller scale in Badrinath in 2017. Social activists told us that it had also been attempted in at least three other towns in Uttarakhand—Ghansali, Augustyamuni and Satpuli. Since Purola, similar efforts to drive out Muslims have been seen in Barkot, Uttarkashi and Haldwani.

“They did it in Purola, now they will try do it in the full Uttarkashi district and if it happens in Uttarkashi, it will go further too,” Malik told us. “When the Uttarakhand state was formed, it was meant for all communities,” he said. “Now in the last five years I’m hearing everyone call it Dev Bhoomi. The message is that Uttarakhand belongs to one side only. The Hindus from my own party are speaking this language.”

Malik is right. In many ways, what happened in Purola is a symptom of a larger and historical Hindu Right project to recast Uttarakhand as a sacred Hindu holy land. Across the hills, hotels and restaurants proudly name themselves after Dev Bhoomi. As one drives into Dehradun, the capital city, a state road sign reads, “Welcome to Dev Bhoomi Uttarakhand.” The state is home to key Hindu pilgrimage sites called the Chhota Char Dham—Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Yamunotri—and to Haridwar, a city considered sacred to Hindus. The Uttarakhand government’s own website declares, “It’s truly God’s land (Dev Bhoomi).” This image of Hindu sacredness has also been bolstered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trips to, and relentless focus on, Kedarnath and Badrinath. “Many congratulations to the people of Dev Bhoomi,” Modi wrote, even while tweeting about something as innocuous as vaccination numbers. While the term Dev Bhoomi is not new, in the recent years it has been accelerated and refashioned into an exclusionary identity that has little room for non-Hindus. “Their thinking is that Dev Bhoomi is ours and Muslims should be removed from here,” Malik said.

Over the last decade, Uttarakhand has seen its identity shift from a mountain state created to represent its indigenous population to a Hindu holy land. This new narrow religious imagination casts Muslims, and other religious minorities, as outsiders. In several interviews, members of Hindutva groups spoke of the need for such an exclusive land—Muslims have a Mecca, they claimed, and Christians, a Vatican City. In their imagination, Uttarakhand is the natural home for such a project, a Dev Bhoomi in which the movement and settlement of Muslims will be restricted.

This campaign is gathering momentum—built on the premise that Muslims are a threat to the purity of a Hindu holy land. In the aftermath of Purola, a new Hindu right-wing group called the Hindu Jagruti Sangathan sprung up in the town of Barkot. The outfit is led by a man in his late twenties called Keshav Giri Maharaj, who locals say is part of the Varanasi-based Juna Akhada—the largest militant monastic order in Hinduism. On his Facebook profile, he describes his affiliation to the RSS. On 24 May, Giri presented a letter to the Barkot sub divisional magistrate specifically demanding that Muslims be prohibited within fifty kilometres of the Char Dham sites. He asked that the letter be sent to the chief minister.

A similar demand echoed across our interviews. We spoke to over twenty people across the Hindu nationalist spectrum in Uttarakhand—including members and leaders of the BJP, RSS, Vishva Hindu Parishad, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, Bajrang Dal and newer Hindu radical outfits who hold considerable sway in the region. All of them called for restrictions on Muslims near Hindu religious sites in Uttarakhand. But this was only the tip. For many, the goal appeared to be the slow cleansing of Muslims from the state. Purola has made clear what is possible.

The narrative of a pure Dev Bhoomi depends on Hindutva conspiracy theories about “land jihad,” “love jihad,” “mazar jihad” and most recently “vyapar jihad”—unsubstantiated claims that Muslims in Uttarakhand, who comprise 13.5 percent of the state’s population, seek to dominate Hindus by capturing land, luring Hindu women, building shrines and taking over local businesses.

The state police, meanwhile, often look the other way. The fears these organisations raise have only been cemented by the statements and policies of the chief minister, Pushkar Singh Dhami, who has also declared that “love jihad” and “land jihad” will not be tolerated in the state. On 10 June, at the height of the Purola campaign, Dhami lent it credibility. “People are coming out against these kinds of crime and against those promoting love jihad as part of a conspiracy,” he said, adding that verification drives will be conducted to “check who the people coming to Uttarakhand are.” Earlier in April, he said, “The religion and culture of our state should be preserved.”

Dhami’s statements and actions are in step with the Hindu Right’s project. While the Sangh Parivar has fuelled communally divisive politics in other parts of the country, Uttarakhand stands as an experiment of something larger—a micro model, a laboratory to create an exclusively Hindu land, a Hindu Rashtra in the truest sense.

IN THE SMALL but bustling market of Purola, Ramesh Thapiyal runs a nondescript medicine shop. A lean, middle-aged, dark-skinned man with a tilak on his forehead, it would be easy to mistake him as an ordinary pharmacist. But Thapiyal is a key figure of the Hindu Right in Purola, part of the VHP and currently serving as the head of the Bajrang Dal’s block unit for Purola. The Bajrang Dal has only gained ground in the town in the last two to three years.

Thapiyal described the mass rallies in Purola as the group’s third successful andolan—movement—in the region. The previous two were against Christian communities. From both his account and that of Ram Pawar, a member of the BJP’s district working committee, the Purola unit of Bajrang Dal was a purely practical necessity.

“In the beginning, we would do everything, but in the political line, some work is forbidden or not constitutional and people have to fight elections,” Pawar told me. “So, it was decided that if you want to do work for Hindus, there should be other wings. The work has to be divided. Maarna, darana, dhamkane ka kaam”—the work of beating people, scaring them. “Our district head decided that we will not do this work. It was decided that other organisations should be made, like VHP and Bajrang Dal who can focus on their mission and work for the Hindu faith. People from within BJP were also sent to these groups.” He continued, “Unke specialist hote hai, thode dabang type ke hote hai”—they have specialists, guys who are the strongman type.

The Sangh Parivar has had influence in the region for nearly eighty years, but in the past five years it has seen accelerated growth. According to RSS office bearers we spoke to, the outfit first emerged in the state in 1940 in Haridwar, followed by Nainital in 1941. Sanjay, the sah prant prachar pramukh—joint head of state communication for the RSS—told us that the Sangh currently has a presence in two thousand villages in Uttarakhand. By the Sangh’s centenary in 2025, the organisation aims to expand further into rural India with the goal of “directly reaching” a hundred thousand villages, he said. As part of this, a significant expansion is also planned in Uttarakhand. The aim is to reach five thousand villages.

At present, the Sangh runs fourteen hundred shakhas—branches—in Uttarakhand, with plans to double this in the next two years. According to the Sangh’s internal mapping, Uttarakhand is divided into 26 districts. These are further divided into 78 nagars and 128 khands, urban and rural postings. “Our goal is that in the next two years there should be a Sangh pracharak, or full-timer, in all of these,” Sanjay said. He added that in a recently concluded camp, forty new pracharaks, or full-time ideologues, had been identified.

About a kilometre uphill from the Purola market, the town’s RSS office was built 25 years ago. Govind Rawat, the Purola district secretary, told us that it runs 33 shakhas in the area, and that regular meetings were happening in almost all panchayats.

“We awaken the public that people from other religions are coming here, they shouldn’t fall into their trap,” Govind said. “Different types of jihad are going on here.” He said small village-level gatherings are held to speak about this. “The message we give is that we are the people of Dev Bhoomi,” Govind said. “And let this remain as Dev Bhoomi.” Another RSS worker sitting nearby interjected, “Everywhere incidents are happening. Murders are happening due to love-jihad. Land jihad capture is happening. This can be stopped if people are made aware, examples are given to awaken people.”

According to Sanjay, this “jan jaagran” or public awakening, is the central focus of the RSS’s work. He said Purola was evidence that such messaging was bearing fruit. “It’s because of our jan jaagran”—public awakening—“that the Purola incident was caught in time,” he said. “It was one of our known people who saw a girl going with two Muslim men.” This is a false claim. One of the two accused was Hindu, and the victim’s own family told the media that the crime did not have a religious angle. Still, Sanjay insisted that a person known to the RSS had foiled the attempt to kidnap the girl. He hailed this as a model to be followed nationwide. “In the entire country, all mothers and sisters should be safe, and if any untoward incident happens, we should give a reply,” Sanjay said. “Hindus should give a reply.” After a pause, he added, “every Indian should give a reply.”

For several Hindutva leaders, the Purola rallies were a befitting reply. “Purola sent a big message at a national level,” Thapiyal said. “It is a great sign that our small step was so successful. It awakened many Hindus and showed that we will counter the increasing dominance of one community here, so that the peaceful valleys of our Dev Bhoomi remain peaceful. If these valleys start boiling, the entire country will be on boil.”

Several Muslim residents told us that even as the protestors proceeded to break the banners and boards of Muslim shops, the police stood by and watched. Saleem, a 35-year-old garment shop owner in Purola, further questioned the subsequent police inaction. “There were CCTV cameras in front of my shop,” he said. “You can see someone putting up the poster. There are CCTVs all over Purola. If the police want, it can arrest all these people.” Saleem was compelled to leave his home of thirty-five years with two bags of clothes and Rs 50 in his pocket.

Another key figure in the Purola mobilisation is Darshan Bharti—a self-styled swami, and the founder of the Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan, which signed the posters demanding that Muslims leave the town. When we met him at his home in Dehradun, he described the conversation he had had with the head of the state’s police force. On 7 June, at the height of the tensions in Purola, Bharti met Ashok Kumar, Uttarakhand’s director general of police. “I told him, ‘You keep the peace and we will keep the peace. You don’t use force and we won’t. You don’t react, as public will get angry. Let the police stay in its place and the public stay in its place, otherwise the public will react.” Even as Bharti posted photos of meeting the DGP, the Purola police filed an FIR against “unknown people” for the disturbance in town. Kumar denied this conversation took place along these lines. “He is talking nonsense,” Kumar said. “He was clearly told that anyone who tries to disturb peace will not be spared.”

Far-right organisations had also announced they would organise a Hindu Mahapanchayat on 15 June. In previous mahapanchayats, Hindu nationalists had made open calls for the genocide of Muslims. After public outcry about forced evictions of Muslims in Purola, the local administration stepped in and imposed prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which restricts public gatherings, in the area. The state administration also denied permission for the mahapanchayat after civil-rights groups approached the Uttarakhand High Court. Bharti said he was subsequently under house arrest for three days. “Our mahapanchayat was to awaken people against love jihad, land jihad and vyapar jihad,” he said. “There will be a mahapanchayat on a grand scale. The government or nobody else will be able to stop it. Maybe we will change the name and do it, but we will definitely do it.”

In contrast to the leniency Bharti faced while seemingly threatening the state’s highest police official, the Muslims of Purola said that until the first week of June, even after the threatening posters were pasted on their shops, they had heard nothing from the administration. On 5 June, Ashraf approached Devendra Sharma, the subdivisional magistrate, with a letter. “We said that we are only five or six Muslim families left here. Our shops are shut since 29 May and we are incurring losses. We asked for police security to reopen our shops,” Ashraf told us.

He described the SDM’s behaviour as gruff and unconcerned. “As soon as we tried to enter the office, I said, ‘Sir we want to give you a letter.’ He said, ‘What letter?’ I said, ‘We are from the Muslim community, we have come here asking for police protection.’ He pointed to a junior and said, ‘Fine, give the letter to him’ and moved on.” The SDM is the top official in the town. “Everyone should be equal for him,” Ashraf said. “He should have given us some assurances that we are with you, nothing will happen.” Sharma did not respond to multiple phone calls.

Ashraf said the junior official assured him that Khajan Singh Chauhan, the station house officer for the Purola police station, would put a few police officers to protect their shops. Two hours later, Chauhan sent a policeman to Ashraf’s house, calling him to the police station. “Your shop won’t open,” Ashraf said the SHO told him. When he asked why, Ashraf said the SHO continued, “There is a lot of opposition among the public about you. You collect people, you make them read namaz in your house, you call people from outside. People are against you and there might be an attack on your shop.” Ashraf was stunned. Chauhan denied this exchange took place.

Purola had around forty-five resident Muslim families and around three hundred migrant Muslim labourers who came to the town for work. There are no mosques in town, so they would collectively offer namaz in two places during religious occasions. Ashraf’s rooftop was one, where close to a hundred and fifty people would gather—as they had for the last eight years. “We would even put curtains and read,” Ashraf said. During the most recent Ramzan, he said, they took a place on rent for a month as a designated namaz spot.

This coming together irked Hindu groups who alleged that a religious conspiracy was underway, and many claimed that Muslims were getting “international funding,” presumably from Arab nations. This claim was repeated to us by BJP leaders in Purola. “They say that there is outside funding involved here through madrasas and Muslim organisations,” Ashraf said. “They could not find any other negative thing, so they targeted us on namaz.” Ashraf said he was specifically singled out because the namaz was held at his home—he was seen as a kind of ringleader.

Ashraf shrugged as he spoke, his voice mellow, with an air of resignation. “To stay here, I will have to change one thing,” he told us. “They have a problem with namaz. We will change that.” He has now agreed that Muslims will no longer offer collective namaz in Purola. That was the price to be able to stay safely in the town that is his birthplace. In the second week of June, in a peace meeting called by the administration, in the presence of the SDM, Hindu groups specifically stated their opposition to public, collective namaz. In that meeting, Ashraf agreed to call it off. When Ashraf made this declaration, giving in to the demand from Hindu groups, he said no one from the administration interjected to say that Muslims should have the right to offer namaz.

A day before Eid, Ashraf was among those called by the administration to inquire about Eid preparations. They were told that they could offer namaz privately but there should be no photos of any Eid Qurbani—a ritual sacrifice conducted on Eid-al-Adha—uploaded on social media. But Ashraf had already given in to the new reality in town. The same story unfolded in Barkot, where Hindu groups demanded, in the presence of the police, that Muslims not be allowed to offer collective namaz, compelling many of those who had remained to leave the town. “They said that namaz will never happen here,” a Barkot Muslim resident present in the meeting told us. Three days after this meeting, he left the town with his family. “The administration was saying we are there but it meant nothing. These people are sitting in front of the police station and tehsil and giving open hate speeches, how can we trust the police?”

On 29 June, the day of Eid, in Purola and Barkot, many shops had their shutters down. Almost all belonged to Muslims. Ashraf woke up early and travelled 33 kilometres to the town of Mori, in the plains, for namaz. For the first time, he prayed in a town that was not his own.

{TWO}

THE ATTEMPT TO EXCLUDE Muslims from Uttarakhand is a century-old project of the Hindu Right. In the early 1900s, Madan Mohan Malviya—the founder of the Hindu Mahasabha, the ideological predecessor of the RSS—founded the Ganga Sabha. The group was initially fighting against British attempts at damming the Ganges, but their ire soon turned against religious minorities. In 1932, when Haridwar’s municipal council was established, on the basis of discussions between the British and Malviya, by-laws were made that restricted non-Hindus near Har Ki Pauri, a neighbourhood where a prayer to the Ganges is performed.

The Ganga Sabha still rules the roost at Haridwar’s religious sites. Ujjwal Pandit is a former vice-president of the BJP’s youth wing and secretary of the Ganga Sevak Dal, a part of the Ganga Sabha. “When the Haridwar Nagar Palika was formed, keeping in mind the sanctity of this place and its religious traditions, a law was made that no alcohol, cigarettes, meat consumption or sale will be allowed within four kilometres north and south of Har Ki Pauri,” Pandit told us. “In addition, no non-Hindu can enter here, and if he does come on some government job, he has to leave before sunset. Non-Hindus cannot establish themselves here, run an established business or buy a house.” Pandit claimed that over the years, as Haridwar grew, the by-law was less commonly enforced. He said that recently, in what seems to be a “planned strategy,” some non-Hindus had established themselves and started working in the region, as labourers, vegetable vendors and carpenters, and were “damaging the purity” of the region.

The Ganga Sevak Dal currently works as a task-force to enforce the by-laws, working to “keep an eye on anti-religious activity” and alerting the police about violators. When people “started encroaching on this region,” he said, it prompted them to start a drive to identify non-Hindus. He estimated that they had handed over at least twelve people to the police recently, several of whom he claimed had hidden their Muslim identities and donned Hindu names. They had also alerted the police about Hindu shop owners who rented places to Muslims. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, an official in the Haridwar police confirmed that municipal by-laws outlining restrictions on non-Hindus do exist. According to him, the main restriction is that non-Hindus cannot stay in the Har Ki Pauri region at night. He said the police receives complaints about such non-Hindu presence. “We take action against those who stay at night,” he said.

It is a version of what exists in Haridwar that Hindu nationalist organisations, and even some senior BJP leaders, seek to implement across Uttarakhand. Ajendra Ajay, a BJP leader and the president of the Badrinath Kedarnath Temple Committee, was one of first officials in the state to speak against “land jihad.” “In the mountain regions locals are migrating, but the population of a certain community is increasing,” Ajay told us. “Uttarakhand is very sacred for Hindus and the purity of this land should be maintained. The special religious and cultural character of the state should be maintained. Around our religious places there should be a notified area and some restrictions on the entry of non-Hindus.

Pandit’s anxiety about demographic change and loss of land have simpler explanations than the grand Muslim conspiracies he points to. Much of Uttarakhand is mountainous, with limited arable land and little in the way of industries. The avenues for employment were always minimal, with most young men in the overwhelmingly upper-caste state joining the Indian army or migrating elsewhere for work. The movement for a separate state of Uttarakhand was itself spurred by the Uttar Pradesh government’s attempt to implement quotas in education and employment for backward castes, a move that the Sangh Parivar had opposed across the subcontinent.

But Muslims too played a major part in the struggle for the state’s creation. “We have been in Uttarakhand since before the state was made, we played a role in the Uttarakhand movement, our families would carry flags and march, we would join even when we were young,” Malik told us. “We have protested, I have carried flags, I have also done hunger strikes, my ancestors have done hunger strikes for this land, and today we are being kicked out from here like you remove flies from milk.”

Employment opportunities remained low after the creation of the new state, and smaller Muslim communities took up odd jobs, masonry, hair-cutting, electrical work, painting or vegetable vending, jobs that much of the state’s upper-caste population avoided. This has been weaponised into fears of Muslims somehow endangering the purity of the supposed Hindu land. Both the state and union government are heavily promoting religious tourism in the state, primarily to the Char Dham, making the limited economy of the state more dependent on the sacrality of the land. Nearly five million pilgrims visit the Char Dham alone every year, almost half of Uttarakhand’s entire population. Modi even boasted that in the next ten years Uttarakhand would see a higher tourist footfall than it had in the past hundred. That the vast highways and hotels built for religious tourism on precarious landslide-prone hills are indelibly damaging their Dev Bhoomi seems of little concern.

Pandit is the Uttarakhand state sub-coordinator of Namami Gange, a river revival project launched by Modi in 2014. As we sat by the banks of the Ganga in Haridwar, he made it clear the town’s by-laws served as a model that should be implemented nationwide. He claimed that a team from Uttar Pradesh had recently come to Haridwar to see how the by-law was enforced and that an attempt was underway to implement similar restrictions in Ayodhya. “In all our pilgrimage sites, whether it’s Ayodhya, Mathura, Kashi, these kinds of rules should be there,” he said. He falsely claimed that non-Christians are not allowed in Vatican city. “Whether it’s Mecca or Vatican City, religious outsiders are not allowed there, so why can’t we implement this in India?”

A DAY AFTER the second rally in Purola, a new WhatsApp group was activated in Naugaon, eighteen kilometres away. It was called Sanatan Hamari Pehchan Hai—Hinduism is our identity—and had 849 members as of the end of June. Deepak Rawat, a pharmacist in Naugaon market, was a member. Similar rallies to those in Purola were held in Naugaon. “Kattarpanti aa gayi hai logon mein”—People are becoming more radicalised—he said. But what happened in Purola was also a familiar script, a repetition of what he had already witnessed five years ago. In 2018, Muslims, as a community, were driven out of town. In conversations across the market, one phrase repeated, “Unko bhaga diya”—Muslims were chased away.

Sumit Rawat, a wheat and rice farmer in Naugaon, described the incident. He said a young girl had been kidnapped by a Muslim waste-picker. The girl was locked inside a bathroom and people passing by heard her calls for help. Soon after she was rescued, he said, “Hindus took out a huge rally.” It spanned nearly a kilometre of the main market road. The purpose of the rally, Sumit continued, was “to get rid of the Muslims.” He participated in it too. “Some hid in fear, others got scared and left,” Sumit said. “We want Muslims to have no rights in our region. How can we trust any of them?”

Naugaon residents estimate around fifty Muslims—the town’s entire Muslim population—left at the time. Several of them had secondhand-clothes shops or ran garment carts in the market. Sumit said the garment carts and some shops were set on fire. As in Purola, the individual act of one Muslim resident became the basis to target the entire Muslim community. Sumit said the rally was not called by any single association but a group of people that comprised individuals from the town’s Vyapar Mandal, youth organisations and Hindu outfits. In the mountains, Vyapar Mandals, associations of the town’s shop owners, hold significant sway and are often led by those associated with the Sangh Parivar.

Jagdish Aswal, the head of the Naugaon Vyapar Mandal, is a member of the RSS. He runs a jewellery shop in the Naugaon market. “It was a huge agitation,” he told us. “There was some violence, it is natural if someone does wrong. Nobody wanted to harass members of any particular community, but they are the ones who do the wrong deeds. These people have a network and a conspiracy, there is a well-coordinated plan against Hindus.” Aswal claimed the presence of Muslims had put the identity of Uttarakhand as a Dev Bhoomi in peril. “If people with this kind of mindset come here, Dev Bhoomi will be tarnished.” Naugaon is what the region’s Hindu nationalists aspire to, a town fully ethnically cleansed of Muslims.

Ten kilometres up the Yamuna, Barkot is now undergoing something similar. In one video of a mass rally there, a loudspeaker plays the chant “Har Ghar Bhagwa Chhayega, Ram Rajya Ab Aayega”—every house will have a saffron flag, Ram’s kingdom is imminent. Other videos show a mob taking down signboards of Muslim shops to loud cheers from the crowd, as the police stand by and watch. According to a Muslim resident, members of the administration such as Anupama Rawat, the municipal chairperson affiliated with the Congress, were present in the rally. He added that Kapil Dev Rawat, a local leader and member of the BJP running for the chairperson’s post in this year’s election also made threatening speeches. “Rawat said Muslims should leave by the 14th or 15th, or else they will see how to deal with it,” the resident said. Kapil confirmed he participated in the rally. He said he gave speeches saying that incidents of “love jihad” should be protested. However, he denied making open calls for Muslims to leave.

As the rally marched through Barkot, Muslim shops were marked out with black crosses. Soon after, much of the town’s Muslim population fled. A second Muslim resident of Barkot described his reaction when he saw the black cross mark drawn on the shutters of his shop. “My first thought was ‘Heil Hitler,’” he said. “I have read Hitler’s history. That’s how he had marked out Jews. It is the same strategy. That’s how we are being identified.” His is one of an estimated forty-three shops to be checked off in this manner—almost all the Muslim shops in the town’s market.

Residents estimated Barkot’s Muslim population to be around four hundred people, with close to forty old-time resident families. While many Muslims from Purola have returned, many from Barkot have not. We tracked down five Muslim families who were forced to leave Barkot and who said they would likely never return. All expressed a sense of terror and dread. “What happened in Barkot is far worse than Purola,” the second resident said. “Here Muslims have been finished.” None of the Muslims who left Barkot were willing to speak without anonymisation for fear for retribution. “All our things are still there,” the first resident said. They had left in a panicked rush and had not yet emptied out their shops—they worried that their shop may be set on fire and their goods damaged if they publicly spoke against Hindu organisations in the town.

The second resident, who left days after the 3 June rally, had just received a call from his brother, who still remains in Barkot. “My brother said when his kids go out to play in the park, the others’ parents call their kids back in,” he told us. “He has also been asked by people, ‘When will you leave?’ How can we live there? It is as if everyone is dead. There is so much hate.” He had spent his whole life in Barkot, and many of his dearest friends were Hindus. “My heart aches that no one has called to ask ‘Where are you, how are you?’”

The Hindu Jagruti Sangathan, led by Keshav Giri Maharaj, has been running a campaign to drive Muslims out of Barkot. On 18 June, while sharing a television screenshot on his Facebook about a swachhata abhiyan, or cleanliness campaign, in the state, Giri said, “Har tarah ka swacchata abhiyan chalega. Abhi shuruat hai,”—Now every kind of cleansing campaign will run. This is just the beginning. The HJS has been going door to door to Hindu landlords in Barkot and asking them to evict their Muslim tenants. Astham Singh Rawat runs a fertiliser shop in the Barkot market. Next door is a barber’s shop with its shutters down and a large black cross mark on it. The Muslim barber who runs it was a tenant of Astham’s family. Astham confirmed that eight to ten people from Giri’s group, including Giri himself, came to his shop multiple times. “They said, ‘Remove them, remove them,’” Astham told us. He said there was a lot of pressure on all the landlords in Barkot and that they had asked the barber to vacate the shop.

Another Muslim resident said that the Anupama, the town’s municipal chairperson, had accompanied the group when they approached his landlord. She denied this but confirmed her participation in the rally. She also simultaneously endorsed the work of Giri’s group. “If there is a threat from someone, remove the threat, don’t give your houses and shops on rent,” she said. “Then such rallies won’t even be needed.” Giri did not respond to multiple calls and a public relations person in his team said he was unavailable for questions.

Sunil Parmar, a VHP leader in Barkot, who is affiliated with the group, spelled out their modus operandi. He said the HJS had been formed after the Purola incident to “unite all the Hindus of Barkot.” What that meant in practice was clear. “We have told everyone that if you want to rent your shops or homes, give it to Hindus, give it to our people,” Parmar told us. He said that if Hindu landlords stopped renting to Muslims, the community would automatically be compelled to leave the town. Parmar also said that Muslims tend to offer higher rents than local Hindus. In some cases, he said that his group has offered to pool in money and try to help out with rent or outstanding payments, as long as the Muslim tenant is asked to leave. “If no one rents to them, where will they stay?” he said. “Slowly, they will have to go.” He added that this same playbook had been successfully implemented in Naugaon, where he had asked Hindu landlords to evict Muslims. “And now there is no one in Naugaon.”

On the evening of 30 June, we met two Barkot residents at a small town on the road between Dehradun and Delhi. They had fled two weeks earlier. The previous day, one of their landlords had asked them to vacate the house they were renting. As night fell, they huddled over a desk, fielding multiple calls to see if they could set up fresh shops and businesses in this new town. “I have two kids. I have bank loans. I have to pay for their education. We are worried about how we will survive now,” one of them said.

Violence followed others who fled. A third resident we spoke to had fled to Vikasnagar, a town near Dehradun. He said two weeks ago another “love jihad” claim by right-wing groups had surfaced in Vikasnagar. “The Bajrang Dal got the market shut down here too,” he said. He was afraid a Barkot-like situation would repeat and immediately dispatched his four young children to their mother’s ancestral home in Uttar Pradesh. “This is torture.” he said. “Even here they are not letting us live in peace. How long will we bear this?” Another Muslim refugee from Barkot said he felt hopeless too. “Where all will they drive us out of. Today they drove us out of there. Tomorrow, they will drive us out of India.”

SEVERAL HINDU LANDLORDS in Purola also face similar pressure to evict Muslim tenants. “Life has become hell now,” one Hindu landlord, who had been renting a shop to a Muslim for 20 years, told us. “People were calling me non-stop 24 hours and saying throw them out.” In early June, days after the anti-Muslim campaign began, “a whole team” visited his house. “RSS people and other Hindu leaders like Darshan Bharti ... a car full of people came to my house,” he said. “They told me and my father not to shelter Muslims.” His father replied that their Muslim tenants have been helpful and are “good people” and do not have any criminal record, but they continued to press on. Bharti denied being present in Purola.

The landlord said that the people came a second time. He described them as “BJP workers, some from RSS, some people from Delhi also came.” The landlord continued, “They called me several times, made me sit in different rooms and spoke to me. They were trying to brainwash me.” He said he was shown several videos. “They said ‘Look what Muslims are doing, look they broke a Maharana Pratap Murti in Udaipur, look they are doing forced conversion, they are increasing their population, they want to rule over Hindustan, look what they are doing with our sisters and daughters.’ They are still sending me these videos.”

After continuous haranguing, in order to pacify them, the family told the Hindu groups that they had asked their Muslim tenant to leave. “I didn’t want to become an enemy of these people in my own region. I have to live here,” he said. It was the rhetoric he heard in the town’s public square that had scared him. “They were saying that those Hindus who shelter Muslims will be boycotted,” he told us. “‘We won’t go to their weddings or attend their social functions, call them to our houses or our festivals.’ BJP people were saying this at the town square. They said ‘The Hindus who keep Muslims, we will hang a list with their names in the town square. Even if someone in their family dies, we won’t go.’”

Pandit, the BJP leader from Haridwar, insisted the presence of Muslim-owned shops in the hills was part of a coordinated attack on Hinduism. “The people historically residing in the hills were sanatanwadi Hindus. Non-Hindus were not present on the hills,” he claimed. He added that Muslims who come to the state to work, “establish themselves here in the guise of employment,” and then call others to join them. “This is a planned conspiracy, and now the people of Uttarakhand are ready to expose this,” he said.

Pandit quickly descended into violent Islamophobic rhetoric. “Uttarakhand people are peace loving and welcome everyone as their guest,” he said. “But when that guest secretly gets involved in sacrilegious activities, it is natural for them to get angry. This is a land of brave women, mothers and sisters who played a role in forming Uttarakhand. These brave women will not hesitate to use the sickle that is used in the fields on their necks.”

Amid the claims of a Muslim conspiracy to overrun Uttarakhand—one repeated by several BJP leaders—is the demand for “police verification of outsiders.” It was repeated by Sangh Parivar leaders across Purola, Naugaon and Barkot. The predominant narrative of Hindu groups is that migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh in the form of hawkers and vendors, what they term “ferry walas,” are entering the hill regions, and indulging in “love jihad” and criminal activity.

They say a large proportion of the “ferry walas” are Muslim. The call to verify the backgrounds of outsiders is in effect a call to verify Muslims and make their pathways into the region more difficult. While many couch this in politically correct terms of “all outsiders should be verified,” the intent becomes clear any time they refer to the supposed increase in “love jihad” because of unverified outsiders.

“We have given the state government a letter that the people of a specific community living in the hills should be verified,” Virendra Rawat, a VHP leader in Purola, told us. “And the people who have been living here for a long time should not call others here.” He said that in the meeting with the administration, “it was discussed that what’s happening in Dev Bhoomi is very condemnable. Wherever the people of this specific community stay, whether in Purola or Barkot, their background should be verified, so that the administration has the correct information on them.” The administration appears to have taken the instructions to heart. Rawat said that process of police verification had begun in Purola. Arpan Yaduvanshi, the Uttarkashi districts superintendent of police, said “Police verification is always on and now it is going on even more rapidly.”

Local BJP leaders seemed fully in-tune with this campaign. “We will not let the demography of Uttarakhand be changed,” Pawan Nautiyal, the BJP’s district secretary for Uttarkashi, told us. “We welcome that Dhami is working toward a beautiful Dev Bhoomi, so that the Dev Bhoomi truly remains a Dev Bhoomi.”

Thapiyal said that the letter outlined other demands including “stopping the cultural changes taking place here. The SDM promised us that these incidents won’t be repeated.” The presence of the Bajrang Dal in Purola had grown significantly in recent years. “Earlier people here only knew about BJP, but now they are coming to us,” he said.

He warned that with their growing strength their next move would be even more explosive. “If the government does not awaken, we will be forced to take next steps, we will have to do a second andolan,” Thapiyal told us. “If such a small andolan of ours from Purola took such a big shape, no one can imagine what kind of shape it will take if a second andolan begins. This andolan was restricted and peaceful. If the administration doesn’t listen to our demands, the second andolan won’t be so limited, it can take a violent turn and the responsibility for that will be on the government, not on us.”

{THREE}

“SOME YEARS AGO, I made Badrinath Muslim mukt”—free of Muslims—Darshan Bharti, the founder of the Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan, told us. When we met him at his home in Dehradun—he sent a government vehicle to collect us—he had recently been questioned by police regarding the violence in Purola. Bharti had just returned from a meeting with the Dehradun police. “I have to decide what I will do, whether to go to jail and get myself arrested or get bail,” he told us. “I will decide what sends the best message to the public.” He added that the police told him, “Who can put you in jail?”

Nobody had yet been arrested for the attack on Muslim shops in Purola, or the fear campaign in Barkot. Yaduvanshi, Uttarkashi’s SP, said two FIRs had been registered against the Purola violence—for the pasting of posters and breaking of property—and that notices have been issued to potential suspects.

The DBRA was only Bharti’s latest project. He has been part of the Hindu Right campaign for decades and, if he is to be believed, has considerable political access, including to the Indian government’s intelligence apparatus. After decades of pushing Hindu nationalist rhetoric across the country, he has settled in Uttarakhand over the last decade, as a member of the Niranjani Akhara—the second largest of the akharas. In 2019, he was briefly arrested after his organisation distributed over a hundred and fifty thousand lakh pamphlets calling for a complete boycott of Muslims in the state. In 2021, he was one of the primary speakers at a dharma sansad—religious summit—in Haridwar, where the various akharas chose him to be part of the core committee to lead an “armed struggle against Muslims.”

Despite his decades-long association with Hindu militarism, he seemed proudest when speaking of Badrinath, and what he had done there in 2017. It marked a beginning, the creation of the Hindu nationalist playbook in Uttarakhand. “Even if it was just for a few days, even if it was just symbolic, there was not one Muslim there,” Bharti said with exhilaration.

Bharti was evidently a central player in the Muslim eviction at Purola. Several people there confirmed that he had been present in the town when the posters were pasted, all signed in his organisation’s name. While officially denying any involvement, he continued to endorse it. “Whoever has done it, it’s not a bad thing, whoever wrote it, whatever they wrote is good,” he said. When speaking of Badrinath, though, he seemingly admitted his role in Purola. “We did the same thing, we put up posters against Muslims on their shops that you leave from here,” Bharti said. “We did not let any Muslim enter Badrinath. That time the people were not so aware, and the media was not with us. It was a starting point. But now the people of Uttarakhand have awakened.”

It was an “awakening” Bharti had ensured through half a decade of attacking Muslim places of worship. “In the last eight years, in the hills, I have not let one masjid, mazar or madrasa be built,” he said. “We stopped them, we broke the damn things. Near Tehri Lake, we demolished a 25-year-old masjid.” He paused before adding, “The government demolished it with our help.” In 2020, Nikita Tomar, a student in Haryana, was shot by two Muslim men. “When Nikita Tomar was killed, as a mark of respect for her, we broke the first mazar, here in Dehradun,” Bharti said. “After that I don’t know how many we have broken. Even we have lost count. In some places, people have themselves broken, they were all part of our mission and inspired by us.”

Even as Bharti spoke of leading acts of violence, he seemed to count among his friends several politicians and administrators in the state and union government. Back in 1992, before the formation of Uttarakhand, Bharti spoke of a time when the entire Tarai region, from Dehradun to Udham Singh Nagar, “was in the hands of Khalistani terrorists.” He said he took out a one-month yatra to engage with people and met the then Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh—from the BJP. “I spoke to Kalyan Singh that I want to alert people and help finish this,” he said. “Kalyan Singh gave me police protection and all the support I needed.”

He said soon after this he got the opportunity to work in Kashmir, when a senior intelligence official introduced him to the former national security advisor Brajesh Singh Mishra. His claims are not beyond the pale of imagination. In the outer room of his house hangs a photo of him meeting the present NSA, Ajit Doval—also a native of Uttarakhand. He said the photo was from when he met Doval two or three years earlier, but said they had also met again as recently as six months ago. He added, “He is also very concerned about this region. He also thinks about the sanatan sanskriti here. I raised the same issues with him, about love jihad and land jihad. This is an international border, so, he is also concerned about that.”

After 12 years in Kashmir “in the backroom,” he returned to Uttarakhand, during the end of the Congress chief minister ND Tiwari’s term in 2007. Bharti claimed to have played a role in bringing the first BJP government to Uttarakhand. “Rajnath Singh was the party president at the time and Ram Lal ji was the organisational general secretary. I had good relations with all of them.” He also said that he was a distant relative of Rajnath Singh. (Rajnath did not respond to questions.)

“I keep meeting Dhami, Dhami mera chela hai, woh apna hai”—Dhami is my disciple, he is ours—Bharti said, referring to Pushkar Singh Dhami. He had met Dhami in 2021, with a letter on the issue of land jihad. “Dhami told me, ‘Of course swami ji, we’ll run a bulldozer over land jihad’,” Bharti said. “He has made a law on love jihad and now he has demolished five hundred mazars. He’s the first chief minister of this state who has worked on land jihad and followed the footsteps of Yogi ji”—Ajay Singh Bisht, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.

Other Hindu radical figures too cited Bisht as the man who drove their work in Uttarakhand. “I know Yogi since the 1985 or 86,” Prabhodhanand Giri told us, when we met him at the premises of a temple trust in Haridwar. Prabhodhanand is the national president of the Hindu Raksha Sena and was a key participant in the 2021 Haridwar Dharam Sansad, where calls were made for a genocide of Muslims. Despite a Supreme Court order on hate speech and an FIR being registered against the Sansad participants, Giri has continued to spout anti-Muslim vitriol in videos and public meetings. “To save the identity of Dev Bhoomi, every single jihadi should be identified and stopped,” he told us. Drawing parallels with ethnic cleansing across the border he said, “Like Myanmar did it, India should be made free of jihadis.”

Two months before the violence in Purola, Prabhodhanand participated in a Dharma Sabha, or religious conclave, organised by the Rudra Sena—another Hindu militia—in Haridwar, where calls for a widespread economic boycott was made. At the meeting, he said “The saints have come from Haridwar and Rishikesh to bless you. All you have to do is stand for yourself. Take your land back.” He continued, “It is the responsibility of the government to help us take every inch of captured land back from jihadis. Arrange a meeting and give an ultimatum of a few months to the government to vacate these lands. Else, tell the government that you’ll do this on your own and the government will be responsible for this.”

Speaking of Bisht, he said, “We met before the 2017 election when he became CM and I still keep meeting him. There is only one topic of discussion with him—how to defend India’s sanatan sanskriti. India is a Hindu Rashtra. How should this Hindu Rashtra be established and declared.” He said that Bisht had indicated to him that since he was now in government, Prabhodhanand should pick up the mantle and carry on the fight for Hindutva. “When you are in government, governments are secular,” Prabhodhanand said. “He fought the Hindutva battle strongly. I have been fighting this battle since the 1980s, but after 2017, I thought now that Yogi ji is in the government, I should come forward and participate fully. This was his wish.” Prabhodhanand said that there had been some tensions between the Hindu Yuva Vahini—Bisht’s paramilitary—and the Uttar Pradesh government in 2017. “He had to disband the Hindu Yuva Vahini, so another Hindu organisation was needed. So, I started the work of the Hindu Raksha Sena.”

He seemingly had easy access to the state’s chief minister, Dhami, too. “I talk about the same things with Dhami ji—to free Uttarakhand of the jihads.” He claimed Dhami was in full agreement with him. “Dhami told me that he will free Uttarakhand from jihad. ‘We will not let Dev Bhoomi’s character be destroyed.’ He said ‘I am the CM, and as the CM it is my duty to protect the identity of Dev Bhoomi.’” Prabhodanand said he had seen the effects of this on the ground too. “Dhami has taken some action, he has destroyed the mazars built illegally and worked on love jihad,” he told us. “The step that Purola took, the same should be repeated in the full Uttarakhand and the entire country.” Dhami did not respond to a detailed questionnaire. Neither did Bisht.

Bharti was clear about the final goal of his crusade. “This is the start for the fight for Dev Bhoomi,” he said. “Just as Islam has a holy land, I want Hindus to see this as their holy land. To truly make Uttarakhand a Dev Bhoomi, ban the entry for non-Hindus within five kilometres of our religious sites. And no Muslims should be allowed to sell items of our religion. Then their encroachment on our religious sites will stop.”

These views were in line with the Sangh Parivar. RSS functionaries described this as a first step. “If restrictions are placed step-wise, in the four Dhams, and places like Haridwar, Rishikesh, automatically other places will also be able to be protected,” Vikram Rawat, the district organisational head of the RSS in Purola, said. Sanjay, the RSS leader, said, “To maintain the purity of our religious sites, people of other religions should have less rights there.” He added that the entire India is the “holy land” of Hindus. “The full India can be our Mecca or Vatican City,” he said. Uttarakhand, he continued is a special sadhna bhoomi—spiritual home. “So, this sadhna bhoomi, it needs to be kept pure.” For Bharti, the work to build a true Dev Bhoomi had begun. “Modi ji has fulfilled the dreams we had for Badrinath and Kedarnath. Modi is not less than Badrinath for us.”

QUESTIONS OF WHO CONTROLS the limited land of the state have been raised for decades. When the state was formed in 2000, Uttarakhand had continued with Uttar Pradesh’s old land law, the Uttar Pradesh Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act, 1950. However, successive governments made changes to the law and introduced ceilings for outsiders wanting to buy land in the state. The first change was brought by the ND Tiwari government, which restricted non-domiciles from buying more than 500 square metres of land. The amendment also restricted the misuse of land, or the illicit conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural land. The following government, under the BJP’s BC Khanduri, further reduced this limit to 250 square meters. But in 2018, the BJP government, under Trivendra Singh Rawat, weakened existing land laws—removing these restrictions, as well as bars on the usage of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes. Rawat defended the changes as necessary for bringing investment to the state, arguing that without industries, the state had no revenue.

But land had always been an emotional issue in the state, and the opposition, led by the Congress, vowed to undo the changes made by Trivendra Singh, promising to bring a law to limit the alleged exploitation of farmland. Around July 2021, largely under the opposition banner, a major social-media campaign called “Uttarakhand maange Bhookanoon”—Uttarakhand wants a land law—started receiving extensive local press coverage. Several activists and politicians told us that the land jihad campaign started soon after, purportedly as a means to undercut and reframe the land law demand. “It is the BJP that accelerated the process of selling the state’s land and now to deal with it they are raising the issue of land jihad,” Indresh Maikhuri, the state secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, told us. It was in late July 2021 that Darshan Bharti met Dhami and officially demanded a law against land jihad.

BJP leaders chimed in too. Ajendra Ajay, the BJP leader, wrote a letter to Dhami complaining about increasing instances of land jihad. Subsequently the Uttarakhand government issued a statement claiming that there has been an “unprecedented rise” in population in some areas, forcing members of a “certain community” to migrate, resulting in “the demography of those areas [being] majorly affected,” and “possibilities that the communal harmony in those areas may be disturbed.” It said that a list of those from outside the state with criminal backgrounds buying land or living in Uttarakhand would be created. “A verification of their profession and domicile status should be done to make their records,” the statement said. It asked district magistrates to “monitor the illegal land dealings” and “check whether someone is selling his land out of fear or pressure.” It called for “strict action” in such cases. A month after Bharti’s “land jihad” campaign started, the state government formed a committee, in August 2021, to look into the issue of a land law. Ajay was made a member.

The findings of the committee were unsurprising. It specifically called for restrictions to be placed on outsiders living in the state and called for “strict punishments” against those who encroach on forest areas and public land and indulge in “illegal occupation through construction of religious shrines.” When we asked Ajay about this, he said, “Illegal mazars are being constructed in large numbers. There are certain things that we can say directly and even the government can’t say in its orders. They can’t use terms like ‘land jihad.’ We said it in this way that a task force should be created to deal with encroachment on government land.”

In May 2023, Dhami vowed to bring a new law that would prevent people with dubious backgrounds from buying land in the state. In July, the government introduced an ordinance to penalise land encroachment. Dhami tweeted, “during the cabinet meeting, our government has approved an ordinance against encroachment on government and private land with the aim of maintaining the original character of Devbhoomi Uttarakhand. Our government is working fast against encroachment and we will not tolerate encroachment on government land in the state under any circumstances.”

Alongside Dhami, several Hindu hardliners we spoke to, from rioters to legislators, tried to spin the presence of Muslims in the state as a national security threat. In line with the Sangh Parivar’s tying of Hindutva to an aggressive militarised nationalism, the Uttarakhand and union government were seemingly in the process of adding a military site to the state’s pilgrimage circuit. In December 2021, defence minister Rajnath Singh laid the foundation stone for a fifth Dham in the Char Dham circuit, called the Sainya Dham, dedicated to the military. In its run up the government ran a campaign mirroring the mobilisation for the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya over the demolished Babri Masjid. They collected soil from the homes of 1,734 deceased soldiers for the construction, much like the VHP’s collection of bricks for the temple in Ayodhya.

The Sainya Dham lies twelve kilometres from the city of Dehradun, right next to the army cantonment. At the site, rapid construction work is ongoing. Staff at the site told us two temples were being built to house the murtis—idols—of two soldiers. At the entrance are two elevated platforms where they said military tanks would be stationed. A fighter airplane lies covered in plastic sheets and another tank sits outside one of the temples. The funding for the construction—an initial allocation of Rs 58 crore, increased to Rs 98 crore—reportedly came from the Army Welfare Fund, meant to rehabilitate war widows or servicemen disabled during operations. Alongside the circuit for the now five Dhams, Uttarakhand’s tourism minister, Satpal Maharaj, said they would introduce a “Modi circuit” for tourism too, following the areas Modi went to inside Jim Corbett Tiger Reserve during his much-televised appearance in the survival reality show Man vs Wild. As new temples for the dead were coming up in Dehradun, at Jim Corbett the sacred graves of the Muslim dead were being demolished.

AT A PUBLIC MEETING near Nainital on 7 April, Dhami claimed that at least a thousand spots had been identified where illegal mazars and “other structures” were built on state land. “We will not let land jihad prosper,” he said. Without specifying what the “other structures” were, shortly before, he had tweeted “We will demolish illegal mazars in Uttarakhand. This is a new Uttarakhand. No one should even think about encroaching on land here, let alone doing it.” Later media reports showed that almost all of these other structures were Hindu temples, far more numerous than mazars built on government land. However, in the following days, 440 mazars were demolished, and only 45 temples. The focus of the campaign had been laid down by Rakesh Uttarakhandi, a disciple of Darshan Bharti, who had been a key figure in the Purola expulsions. Uttarakhandi had been issuing threats to Muslim communities in the state’s forests, demanding they leave the region before 10 April or face consequences.

The most prominent mazar to be raised is the Thapli Baba ki Mazar, a half kilometre off the highway, within the Jim Corbett Tiger Reserve. It is estimated to be a hundred and fifty years old, older than the man the reserve is named after. “We were not given a proper notice and when they came to demolish the mazar, they did not even allow us to take away the remains,” Nawab Ali, the caretaker of the mazar, whose family has worked there for three generations, told us. Kishan Sharma, a regular visitor to the shrine, often sets up a tea stall at the mazar during the three-day Urs event. “Most of the visitors at the mazar were Hindus,” he told us. “Uttarakhand had a syncretic culture. Hindus of Bharatpur, Pampapur, Lakhanpur used to believe in this Mazar.”

“My family came to this village in 1972,” Kishan told us. “Before the Corbett administration put restrictions in 1991, I used to go inside the forest to gather fodder for my buffaloes. Now we can’t afford to keep any livestock because of these restrictions.” The worst effects of the restrictions have been on the Van Gujjar community, a predominantly Muslim pastoral tribal group. While the Van Gujjar community in Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh seasonally migrate with their cattle, the community in Uttarakhand have lived in semi-permanence inside the forest for centuries.

Most of the recent mazars the Dhami government has demolished are Van Gujjar graves. “When their loved ones pass away, they bury them within the forests they call home,” Munish Kumar, a local activist, told us. “In order to create a lasting memory, they construct the graves a few feet above the ground. However, the government has been destroying these graves. This is what they call a successful campaign against land jihad.”

Further into the forest was another mazar that was demolished in Dhami’s latest drive. The many graves around—marking the ancestors of the Van Gujjar hamlet of Nathewal Katha—were bulldozed too. When we reached there, between torrential cloudbursts that left the forest path a mire, we found rows and rows of rubble, demolished graves. The village had never had an electricity connection or a local panchayat and no one had access to ration cards.

Ghulam Rasool, a 63-year-old from the village, walked us around the mazar and told us, “All my relatives and elders are buried in this jungle. In 1950, my grandfather was buried here, my grandmother was buried here and my mother, father, brother and a son are also buried here.” He said that it was prohibitively expensive to carry the bodies of their dead to the city graveyard. They faced hostility there, being told that “jungle people” cannot be buried there. Burying in the city would now be even harder—as part of the campaign to put pressure on them, a bulldozer had dug a trench across the only path to their village, allegedly on the orders of the forest department. (The forest department did not respond to questions.)

The three-day fair around the mazar had been the economic lifeblood of the community. Their only means of livelihood was their cattle, which they now could not graze in the forests. The monsoons were so harsh that most of the community could not leave their huts. The graves of the ancestors who held them in place for centuries were now in ruins. And now, Rasool said, “We who they called tribals and Van Gujjars for years are now called Muslims, accused of land jihad.” In a state created to protect indigeneity, its first citizens, its most vulnerable, were also being pushed out. The government seemed determined to make them leave the forest. And given the situation, Rasool told us that the community were ready to comply, if they were given fair rehabilitation. They had little reason to stay. But if they left the forests, all they would find outside is a Dev Bhoomi, which has no space for them.

This reporting is part of the Coda-Caravan fellowship.

Tusha Mittal is the Coda-Caravan fellow. She has written on politics, development, gender and social justice. Her work has appeared in Tehelka, Al Jazeera and the Washington Post among other publications.

Alishan Jafri is an independent journalist based in New Delhi, and contributes to various national and international journalistic platforms. He writes on human rights, media, misinformation and the rise of extreme politics in India.