Mosque-temple spat: Why has India’s Sambhal exploded into violent clashes?

New Delhi, India — When Nayeem Ahmad, 35, left his sweets shop on Sunday morning to buy cooking oil, his younger brother, Tasleem, did not know that interreligious tensions were boiling over in Sambhal, their hometown in northern India’s Uttar Pradesh state.

Within a few minutes, Tasleem received a phone call he will never forget: “My elder brother was shot dead by the police in daylight.”

Protests had broken out in Sambhal on Sunday morning after a local court ordered an archaeological survey of a 16th-century mosque, the Shahi Jama Masjid, acting on a petition claiming that a Hindu temple once stood in its place.

Amid clashes with the police, at least five people have died from bullet injuries. The families of the victims and other protesters accuse the police of shooting them dead. The police, in turn, say “miscreants opened fire” and they “are investigating the source of the gunfire”.

After the violence, the district authorities snapped the internet, ordered the closure of schools, and barred entry of any outsider as markets remained shut amid a police crackdown and curfew-like situation, locals told Al Jazeera.

So, what triggered the protests in Uttar Pradesh, India’s biggest state; how unique is the claim of a mosque being built over a temple, and why do some senior lawyers blame the country’s top court for all of this?

Armed police personnel stand guard following religious violence near the Shahi Jama Masjid in Sambhal on November 24, 2024 [AFP]

What triggered the Sambhal protests?

Over the past three years, Hindu nationalist groups and activists have flooded the Indian judiciary with petitions across several states, alleging that Muslim religious sites are built on razed Hindu temples.

On November 19, a local court in Sambhal heard one such petition, which claimed that a Harihar Temple was converted into a mosque in 1529, pleading that the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) ought “to manage and to have complete control” over the site.

The court ordered a survey of the mosque premises, which took place on the same day. The team, however, returned for a second visit in the early hours of Sunday morning, and “the news spread panic quickly across the town”, Mashood Ali Farooqui, an advocate who was part of the survey team, told Al Jazeera.

“Misinformation spread quickly that the survey team was digging inside the mosque, and it triggered the crowd gathered around the mosque,” he said, adding that from his experiences, “we found nothing out of place or contradicting evidence”.

Some activists accompanying the survey team also raised Hindu nationalist slogans, said Farooqui, adding “it was an irresponsible act that worsened the situation”.

The plaintiffs in this case, led by advocate Vishnu Shankar Jain, are also behind several similar petitions claiming there were temples where some mosques stand today in the Uttar Pradesh cities of Varanasi, Mathura, and Agra. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rules Uttar Pradesh.

The Shahi Jama Masjid enjoys the official status of a “protected monument” and has been earlier declared a “monument of national importance”. It is among the three significant mosques — two others being in Haryana state’s Panipat and the demolished Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh — built during Mughal Emperor Babur’s reign.

Is the survey legal?

In 1991, India’s Parliament passed the Places of Worship Act. That law essentially laid down that the religious character of all places of worship would remain the same as it was on August 15, 1947 — when British India was divided into India and Pakistan — and could not be changed.

The trigger for the law was the mass mobilisation campaign led by the BJP’s leaders to bring tens of thousands of activists to the city of Ayodhya to demand that a temple be built at the site of the historic Babri Masjid. Ayodhya, according to Hindu scriptures, was the birthplace of God Ram, and far-right Hindu activists have long alleged that the mosque was built on a demolished Ram temple.

The law could not stop a mob from tearing down the mosque in 1992. But in 2019, while awarding the land on which the mosque once stood to a trust to build a temple — and allotting a patch of land elsewhere for the construction of a mosque — the Supreme Court of India upheld the Places of Worship Act, making it clear that the “court cannot entertain claims that stem from the actions of Mughal rulers against Hindu places of worship today”.

However, when a similar mosque-atop-temple case, from Varanasi, Modi’s parliamentary constituency, reached the Supreme Court in May 2022, the court of then Chief Justice DY Chandrachud allowed an archaeological survey.

While noting that there could be no conversion of the place, Chandrachud said the structure’s “original character” could always be determined. Later that month, a local court in Mathura admitted a plea seeking the transfer of the land of the Shahi Idgah mosque in the city to a Hindu trust for the construction of a temple to God Krishna.

“It was a really dangerous flip-flop by the chief justice,” said Colin Gonsalves, a senior lawyer and founder of the Human Rights Law Network. “It has opened floodgates of similar pleas that threaten the status of Muslims in India.”

Since then, many such cases have been filed, often supported by lawmakers of the BJP.

Who is responsible?

“By closing the Ayodhya verdict, the top court had believed that it has pushed the genie of communal majoritarianism back in the bottle,” said Sanjay Hegde, a senior Supreme Court lawyer.

However, Chandrachud’s “unguarded comments in the Varanasi case, which were not even sought by counsel for the parties, stoked the fires across the country and the genie resurfaced with fresh claims”, Hegde added.

Nadeem Khan, the national secretary of the Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), an advocacy group that is in Sambhal on a fact-finding mission, told Al Jazeera that the “survey of mosques has turned into an instrument of political strength”.

“The Muslim community fears that these surveys will lead to losses of their places of worship,” Khan told Al Jazeera. “Because of Chandrachud’s comments, people are losing their lives on the streets. The Supreme Court opened this Pandora’s box and paved the path for further hooliganism.”

Gonsalves, the lawyer, recalled being shocked by Chandrachud’s comments when the Varanasi case reached the top court.

“Instead of putting out the fire immediately, now the fires are burning everywhere in India,” he said. “The judiciary allowed the communal forces a kind of licence to take the law into their own hands.”

Back at their small home in Sambhal, Tasleem is attending to mourners after his elder brother, Nayeem’s death. Nayeem is survived by his wife and four children, the eldest being 10 years old. “My brother was not among the protesters and yet the police killed him,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Who should we ask for justice now?”