Hate Crime Tracker Documents Anti-Muslim Violence in India

A monitoring initiative called the India Persecution Tracker, run by the South Asia Justice Campaign, has documented at least 13 killings of Muslims in religiously motivated hate crimes across India during the first four months of 2026. The victims span a wide range of ages and circumstances, including two women, a 15-year-old boy, and a 65-year-old man — a spread that underscores how these incidents have affected entire families and communities rather than any single demographic within them.

According to the tracker's data, one additional death in the reporting period involved the suicide of the wife of a lynching victim, a detail that points to the broader, harder-to-quantify toll these incidents take beyond the immediate act of violence itself — grief, trauma, and loss rippling outward to family members left behind.

The report situates these killings within a wider pattern of anti-Muslim violence, hate speech, and what it describes as police abuses across several Indian states currently governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Perhaps most troubling among the tracker's findings is its documentation of the obstacles victims face in seeking justice after the fact: the report alleges that police frequently failed to properly register complaints brought by Muslim victims and their families, and in some instances filed cases against the victims themselves rather than against the perpetrators of the violence.

This pattern of alleged institutional failure was echoed in a related but independent finding from investigative outlet Bellingcat, which analyzed social media activity from the BJP in Assam and West Bengal and found that nearly two in five of the posts analyzed matched the United Nations' definition of hate speech — frequently portraying Bengali-origin Muslims as "infiltrators" rather than long-standing residents. Taken together with the hate crime tracker's findings, this suggests a climate in which online rhetoric and on-the-ground violence may be reinforcing one another, with limited institutional pushback in either direction.

Adding further weight to these concerns, United Nations special rapporteurs on torture and extrajudicial executions issued a warning in February 2026 about what they characterized as systemic policing failures in India, specifically raising concerns over excessive and often lethal use of force disproportionately affecting Muslims, Dalits, and Indigenous Adivasi communities. The involvement of UN-level human rights mechanisms signals that these concerns extend well beyond any single organization's monitoring efforts, pointing to a pattern serious enough to draw international scrutiny.

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For SARFO, data-driven tracking projects like the India Persecution Tracker serve an important function alongside individual news reports: they help establish whether specific incidents are isolated events or part of a broader, sustained pattern. The finding that police response itself may be compounding harm — through failure to register complaints, or by filing charges against victims — raises particularly serious questions about accountability and access to justice for religious minorities navigating India's legal system in the aftermath of violence.

Source: Muslim Network TV — Read the full report