“A direct assault on India’s secular fabric.” Why is India profiling mosques in Kashmir?

In mid January, Al Jazeera reported on the increase of what is being seen as surveillance on mosques in Indian-administered Kashmir (or IAK). According to an interviewee for the article, the police in the IAK’s city of Srinagar began to send out forms “literally titled “profiling of mosques”” as per the article. What the four-page forms, as laid out by the AJE article, ask for is as follows:

One page of the form collects information about the mosque itself, seeking information about the “ideological sect” it belongs to, the year it was founded, its sources of funding, monthly expenditure, the number of people it can congregate, and details on ownership of the land on which the structure stands.

The remaining three pages collect personal details of the people – imams, muezzins, khatibs and others – associated with the mosque, including their mobile numbers, emails, passport, credit card and bank account details. The more insidious columns in the form ask the respondents to declare if they have relatives abroad, the “outfit” they are associated with, or even the model of their mobile phone and their social media handles.

A similar form has also been shared with the people running “madrasas” (religious schools) in the region.

As the interviewee remarked, “I do not understand why the police need this much personal information. Keeping such detailed records is not safe for families like mine. In a conflict area like Kashmir, this can have serious consequences.”

Analysts and others that spoke with AJE and other media outlets say that this is discriminatory, and “places pressure on Muslim institutions without similar scrutiny of other faiths”.

The spokesperson for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – one of India’s ruling parties – in Kashmir, claims that there’s a good reason to“know what is taught in these mosques.”Altaf Thakur, the BJP spokesperson, made the claim that“past experience tells us that mosques were used in Kashmir by maulvis [prayer leaders] to ask people to come out and hold pro-Pakistan rallies.” This is not the first time that Thakur has echoed such sentiments, saying last March that the“government should intensify its crackdown on individuals and groups spreading radical ideologies and misleading the youth into destructive paths”.

That Thakur used the word “crackdown” is telling, as this could indicate a return to a particular modus operandi. As discussed by Citizen South in December 2020, the independent Kashmiri journalist Aakash Hassan had written for the Intercept, recounting:

accounts by journalists, activists and ordinary citizens - angry with the authorities and what they regard as media silence on human rights abuses in Indian-administered Kashmir - of being summoned by the police without reason, only to be taken to a notorious torture complex known as the Cage, and then made to hand over their phones and social media login information, sometimes after severe beatings and threats of death or jail.

Aakash Hassan’s article quoted the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, whose report stated:

The [Internet] siege serves as a deliberate means of severing social, economic and political connections between Kashmiris, while also isolating them from the world. For the already vulnerable people of Jammu & Kashmir, who live amidst a state of perpetual war and permanent emergency, it enacts a ‘digital apartheid’, a form of systemic and pervasive discriminatory treatment and collective punishment.

The Hindu’s Frontline also carried an article on the profiling of mosque, with the spokesperson for the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) asserting that what the police are doing is:

“in contravention of fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution. It also violates the tenets of basic, universally accepted human rights. There seems to be social, political, and administrative sanctity to arm-twist Muslims, and more so in Kashmir.”

The Frontline article also cites the authorities using the 2025 attack on Pahalgam as a basis for the“massive mosque-mapping drive”as part of their enhanced“security architecture. The authorities argue that strengthening the security grid is necessary to avoid untoward incidents in the future.”

The chairperson for the The Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Conference (JKPC) raised the point that “pushing Muslims to the wall and making them suspect is a security risk in itself. No security threat is bigger than the idea of secular India”, calling the profiling a “direct assault on India’s secular fabric.”

That "secular fabric”, part of India’s constitution, has come under serious threat over the past decade, with attacks on non-Hindu religious groups becoming frequent and fairly normalised, to the point of killings. Scholars outside India have also received death threats for criticising Hindutva (far right Hindu nationalism) political narratives and revisionism.

As the PDP spokesperson remarked:

“to be a Muslim has become an anathema. One doesn’t know what is going to happen next. Unfortunately, isolated acts of violence are stereotypically linked to Islam, but no one seems willing to discuss security lapses.”