On August 8, the Muzaffarnagar police booked Sajid Rashidi, president of the All India Imam Association, for questioning aloud whether men who smash a school van’s windshield or kick a uniformed policeman can still be called devotees of Shiva. The FIR followed his remarks within days. Four days earlier, in neighboring Hapur, a twenty-four-year-old truck driver named Mohammed Azeem had died in a Delhi hospital, four days after a group of kanwariyas pulled him from his cabin and beat him following a minor collision on July 31. Seven persons were named in the FIR over his death, among them Manish, Ankit, Lokesh, and Shivam. As of that week, none had been arrested.
Two FIRs, ten days apart, in the same district cluster, over the same pilgrimage. One produced a swift case against a man who criticized violence in words. The other produced a named accused, a dead man, and an empty lock-up. It takes no conspiracy theory to notice the asymmetry. It only takes the willingness to ask what the asymmetry is doing.
This is not an essay about Hinduism or about the Kanwar Yatra as devotion. Crores of kanwariyas complete the pilgrimage every year without incident, walking barefoot in saffron on a private vow the Constitution rightly shields under Article 25. The subject here is narrower and less comfortable: the conduct of the state once the procession leaves the temple gate and enters the space where other citizens drive, sell food, and send children to school.
Does the state merely protect the right to worship, or does it, in practice, extend something more: a zone of administrative and political accommodation that other citizens and other faiths do not receive?
Call it a working test: the same crime, the same state response. When a vehicle grazes a Kanwar and is vandalized in return, how fast does the FIR move, and against whom? When a shopkeeper breaches not a law but an administrative advisory, how fast does the bulldozer arrive? In Bareilly’s Bahedi area, police detained two shopkeepers, Salman and Raees, after raiding their biryani stall for allegedly selling non-vegetarian food along a Yatra route.
Within a day, municipal teams had demolished the shop’s tin structure. Set that timeline beside Hapur: an administrative advisory produces demolition within a day; a fatal assault produces named suspects and no custody after a week. If the gap reflects only investigative difficulty, the police can say so plainly. If it reflects something else, the Constitution already has a word for it: unequal protection.
Article 14 is forbidden and applied to the very citizens. Article 21 exists to keep alive. None of this is new, and that is the point. In 2024, a police order requiring eateries statewide to display owners’ names was stayed by the Supreme Court within days, the Court holding that pilgrims could know what food was served without knowing who served it.
In 2025, the same instruction returned as a QR code disclosing ownership details; the court, noting only that the Yatra was “ending” that day, declined to examine the substance at all. In 2026, the Chief Minister’s office again directed every shop on the route to display its operator’s name. Each year the order returns in a new form; each year the institution built to test it against Article 27’s promise of state neutrality in religious matters finds a procedural reason to wait until the question is moot.
A constitutional guarantee litigable only after it no longer matters is a thin sort of guarantee. The same closures that protect a pilgrim’s Article 25 right to walk with a sealed pot also suspend, for days at a stretch, other citizens’ Article 19 freedoms to move, trade, and open a shop. That is a trade-off the Constitution tolerates only if it is administered evenly, not as a courtesy extended to one congregation and withheld from another.
To be fair to the record, the picture cuts both ways. This August, the Supreme Court asked the Centre to respond to a plea for a standing SOP to govern the Yatra. It is a belated acknowledgment that ad hoc handling has failed for years.
Restrictions on Tazia height, weapons display, and provocative sloganeering have, in past seasons, been issued for Muharram in the same official reviews that set rules for the Kanwar Yatra, evidence that the regulatory reflex is not reserved for one community’s calendar alone. And some of this year’s more heartening moments were real: a Muslim youth from Meerut, Shakir, and his Hindu friend carried a 251-liter Kanwar together to make a public point about friendship, and, according to widely shared accounts, a young Muslim man in Muzaffarnagar who wanted to join the pilgrimage after being threatened by members of his own community was given police protection to complete it.
Not every video from the route is authentic. Not every restriction is communal. And most kanwariyas bear no responsibility for what a few of them do on a highway. A serious argument about selective enforcement has to hold all of this in view and still ask why the difference in speed, in force, and in tone keeps recurring in one direction.
Behind the case numbers is a shopkeeper whose tin counter is now rubble over a plate of biryani and a family in Hapur (a wife, an infant son, and a father who has been bedridden for more than a year) still waiting to learn whether anyone will be arrested for killing their son. For them, equality before law is not an abstraction from a textbook. It is a specific, answerable question: Does the state move as fast for them as it does for a procession?
Democracies are not measured by how warmly they welcome the powerful. Uttarakhand’s chief minister showered flower petals on pilgrims from a helicopter this year; that costs a state nothing. What actually tests a secular republic is whether it can restrain the powerful with the same speed and the same indifference to who is offended that it shows in celebrating them. Until it can, what India calls freedom of religion is drifting, procession by procession, toward a hierarchy of whose faith the law is still willing to interrupt.
