India’s Ujjain tense as mosque partially demolished for Hindu pilgrimage 

Zeeshan Khan says he has not slept properly for three nights in a row.

It began on Sunday when the 30-year-old joined hundreds of Muslims in central India’s Ujjain city for a night vigil outside a prominent mosque to prevent its partial demolition to widen the road for a Hindu pilgrimage festival held every 12 years.

Ujjain is about 200km (124 miles) from Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh state, which has been governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2003, barring a brief 15-month rule by the opposition Congress.

The Hindu nationalist BJP has been accused of a deliberate campaign to target Muslim religious structures – mosques, shrines, graveyards and madrasas (Islamic schools) – by claiming they were either illegally built or stood on former Hindu temples.

Hundreds of Muslim sites have been partially or fully demolished by the authorities in several BJP-governed states in recent years, many of them in the dead of night. In many cases, the demolitions took place even as the matter was still pending in courts.

The Muslim residents of Ujjain, who had similar fears of a nightly demolition, congregated outside the Shahi Mosque in Ujjain’s Chhatri Chowk area on Sunday night to protest against the planned demolition.

The government aims to clear and widen the road for Simhastha Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage to be held on the banks of the Kshipra River in 2028.

“It started about two months ago, when the Ujjain Municipal Corporation issued a notice to the Shahi Masjid, saying that the mosque would have to be acquired because the road needed to be widened,” Khan, who runs a digital marketing business, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday.

He said the municipal authorities gave a September 10 deadline to “remove the structure ourselves”, failing which, the government would take strict action.

Meanwhile, a petition filed by the Muslims before the local High Court urging a halt to the demolition was dismissed, with the court saying the 2028 Hindu pilgrimage needs additional space to manage the traffic.

“Their argument was that a lot of people would be coming from outside and that the public should not face problems. So public interest had to come first,” Khan, 30, told Al Jazeera.

As protests continued, the mosque management held several rounds of discussions with the district authorities, forcing them to agree to three feet of space from the street to be removed instead of the more than seven feet of structure originally demanded by the officials.

On Sunday night, as the administration brought bulldozers near the mosque, thousands of people congregated at Chhatri Chowk. Authorities said AI-generated social media posts by some Muslim men caused rumours that the mosque was set to be demolished, triggering the night-long demonstration.

“But the administration blocked the area and told the community: ‘Either you demolish the mosque yourselves, or we will demolish it’,” said Khan.

As tension flared on Monday morning, the police fired tear gas to disperse the protesters. According to media reports, the demonstrators threw stones at the police, who launched a baton attack on the crowd, in which at least a dozen people were injured. Several men were also arrested.

Meanwhile, as fears of an outright bulldozer action on the mosque grew, the mosque committee agreed to remove a part of the structure themselves. Dozens of Muslim men began taking down the platform along the mosque, using hammers and rods.

“We demolished it with our own hands,” Khan said. “It hurts us deeply.”

On Tuesday, part of the mosque’s minaret was removed by the authorities, he added. “They started the demolition work on the minaret, but no such work has started inside the mosque yet.”

Authorities in Ujjain have sealed the area around the Shahi Mosque and deployed heavy security.

As Ujjain remained tense, a Muslim group held a protest on Tuesday in the national capital “against the continued action and demolition targeting mosques and places of worship”. Organised by the Monitoring Committee of Indian Muslims, the protesters included several Muslim parliamentarians and religious leaders.

“Our issue is much bigger than a single mosque or a single community. When a place of worship is demolished, or action is taken against it without ensuring legal and constitutional protections, it raises serious questions about the rule of law,” Syed Sadatullah Hussaini, president of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, said in a statement.

Several calls made by Al Jazeera to two BJP spokespersons in Madhya Pradesh went unanswered.

Asif Mujtaba, founder of a New Delhi-based charity, told Al Jazeera that many Muslims connect demolition drives with the broader political environment in the country since the BJP came to power.

“People link these demolitions with the language used in politics, with campaigns around mosques, with pressure on madrasas and with repeated disputes around Muslim institutions,” he said.

“People see their history disappearing from the city.”