Yogi police arrest, humiliate 30 Muslims, including minor madrasa students during Milad procession
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The BJP government led by Yogi Adityanath, which is known for its bias in criminalising Muslims, once again proved it is anti-Muslim by arresting 30 Muslim youths, including minors, for taking another route instead of the prescribed one for the Eid Milad-un-Nabi procession, apart from forcing them to undergo the barbaric act of holding their ears in a gesture of apology before the public and the camera, which rights defenders described as humiliation, selective targeting, and bias against the community.
The arrests took place in Uttar Pradesh’s Firozabad on 6 September, where police claimed that the young men strayed from the designated route, and they were detained and compelled to perform the humiliating act that was both filmed and circulated, while their names and faces were also released publicly, thereby drawing widespread outrage from civil society groups and opposition leaders.
Police registered cases under sections 223(a) for disobedience to a public servant’s order and 126(2) for wrongful restraint of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and the operation involved police teams from Ramgarh, Rasoolpur, Uttar and Dakshin stations, who also seized 14 motorcycles during the crackdown, even as critics insisted that the move was yet another example of discriminatory policing in Uttar Pradesh, according to Maktoob Media.
Rights defenders stressed that the episode fit into a larger pattern of clampdowns on Muslim gatherings, which often face harsh police action, whereas violent incidents linked to other groups are allowed to pass unchecked, and they recalled that public shaming through posters and videos was earlier condemned by the judiciary as unlawful and unconstitutional.
AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi condemned the arrests as evidence of police bias, arguing that for the minor act of straying from a route, Muslim youths were paraded and humiliated, while accountability was not enforced in instances where Muslims themselves had been attacked, such as during a Kanvaprocession in Kanpur earlier this year, and he linked the incident to past practices of “naming and shaming” CAA protesters, which were struck down by the Allahabad High Court in 2020 and subsequently questioned by the Supreme Court.
Advocate Sagheer Ahmed, representing the accused, argued that the boys were not engaged in any unlawful act, explaining that some madrasa students had merely taken an alternative road after the procession ended in order to avoid obstructing traffic, yet they were picked up and booked by the police, while raids were also conducted in the following days in Rasoolpur, Ramgarh, and Thana Uttar, leading to additional arrests including of minors.
Human rights groups denounced the episode as state-sponsored humiliation, with the Association for the Protection of Civil Rights warning that forcing young men to hold their ears in public amounts to a violation of Article 21 of the Constitution and causes psychological harm, while also stigmatising them in society, especially as some of the accused are still in custody despite bail being granted to others.
Critics underscored that the Firozabad arrests reflected the same unlawful tactics deployed during the anti-CAA protests, when posters with the personal details of demonstrators were displayed in public, a move struck down by the Allahabad High Court as a violation of privacy and questioned by the Supreme Court for lacking legal basis, and they insisted that the recent incident again exposes how the state machinery is being weaponised against Muslims through fear, spectacle, and targeted policing.
