Mathura: Afroz Alam was known for running a restaurant in the heart of Mathura’s Bharatpur Gate since 2010. His business employed a whole host of people – waiters, chefs, grocery suppliers, poultry suppliers and managerial staff.

But in September 2021, when the Uttar Pradesh government declared 22 wards of the Mathura-Vrindavan Nagar Nigam area to be a holy pilgrimage site, several people in these wards – including Alam – lost their livelihoods.

The UP government intended to ban the sale of liquor and non-vegetarian food items in these 22 wards notified as “pavitra teerth sthal (holy pilgrimage sites)”, and nine additional wards had been given the same status previously, according to local authorities. After the area around Krishna Janmabhoomi was declared a pilgrimage site, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) department in Mathura cancelled the licenses of several meat shops and non-vegetarian restaurants located in certain areas (including Daresi Road, Machhli Mandi and Kathauti ka Kuan) as part of the enforcement of the ban. The restrictions covered not just retail meat shops/restaurants but also slaughterhouses (which engaged in bulk meat processing/wholesale operations) inside the restricted zone.

Beyond butchers, religious buildings and business, a lot has changed in Mathura in the last decade. The Wire spoke to locals and saw a tear in the fabric of friendship between Hindu and Muslim communities.

A changed reality

Altaf’s daily routine is simple. His day is dictated by the five prayers he must offer to maintain his inner calm. Without namaz, he believes life loses its balance. But there is one more thing that he never forgets – to put his saffron gamcha on his shoulder whenever he leaves the house. The 30 year old believes this cloth protects him.

“This is for my safety. Local extremists have targeted me too many times for being Muslim. Sometimes they make an issue out of the chicken that I buy, sometimes they call me a ‘threat’ to security. I wear this so that they take time to identify me before assuming that I’m a ‘threat’ as always,” he explained.

For Mujeeb Ur Rehman, an Islamic scholar and social worker who has grown up in a Mathura which symbolised syncretism, the Mathura of today seems like a parallel reality. “I will tell you about an incident which happened with me. Some friends and I got on a bus to travel outside Mathura. I am 55 and my friends are almost of the same age. When we got on the bus, people were asking each other not to give space to us Muslims. The politically produced hatred has trickled down to something as minimal as a bus seat. We traveled standing because of this,” Rehman shared.

In August 2025, locals told The Wire that an elderly Muslim man was attacked in Mathura for selling non-vegetarian food, even though he was far away from the wards where it is banned. “A man of my age was attacked and humiliated by random Hindu men claiming to belong to a Hindu group. Muslims are being labelled as termites and certain Hindu leaders are facilitating this – and in this every Hindu feels above the law,” Rehman continued.

Another local, Maqsud Ali, who used to run a non-vegetarian restaurant, sits idle now. Ali understands that his inability to earn from the restaurant is rooted in the rhetoric created by the BJP-RSS and its nexus of extremist Hindu organisations.

Many large- and small-scale vendors and restaurateurs in Mathura are facing a double whammy. Even during the recent Navratras, fears of local Muslims manifested in the detention of a young Muslim man who was going back home after purchasing a kilo of chicken. According to locals, the man was picked up by the police on the suspicion of selling non-vegetarian items in the banned wards. All he had on him was a mere kilo of chicken.

Such random arrests of Muslims have created a climate of fear that has seeped into daily life. Many residents share that they now avoid buying meat regularly, worried that even ordinary acts like visiting a butcher or cooking at home could invite suspicion, harassment or arrest. The uncertainty is compounded by Uttar Pradesh’s strict but unevenly enforced cow protection laws, which Muslim residents say give police sweeping powers and leave people vulnerable to false accusations. As a result, some Muslims report self-censoring their dietary choices, describing the situation as an attack not just on livelihoods but also on dignity and the freedom to live normally.

Apart from laws that limit the chances of earning livelihood, vendors like Baheed Qureshi have reported that acquiring new licenses from the local administration has been tougher since the ban. “If someone runs their business in the 22 wards, and has to shut shop because of a ban, acquiring a new license for another shop becomes a struggle too,” he said.

In between the many religious, social and political layers of air that Mathura breathes, advocate Madhuvan Dutt Chaturvedi views the food ban as “unnecessary and not required”.  “When one looks at the communities affected by the ban, it is Muslims, Dalits, SC. This was just to increase the fan following of the BJP-RSS. It was just the excuse to use ‘Ayodhya toh jhaanki thi, Mathura Kashi baaki hai’ to further political motives,” he explained.

Lalit Chouhan, a Mathura-based Congress worker, says that Mathura’s identity was never the problem, and neither was the identity of its residents heightened to this degree. “I have grown up in the vicinity of the Janmasthan and Eidgah. We have lived in amity for years, why do they claim that Hindus have a problem only now? BJP thinks it can fool people forever, but Hindus are waking up to the truth that the BJP-RSS nexus is truly using them electorally,” Chouhan told The Wire.

Between azaan and aradhna

In Mathura’s Gulshan E Raza Masjid, like clockwork the frail muezzin knows when it is time to recite the azaan for the evening prayers. In the small verandah of the mosque, where goats run to ram their horns into each other, he gently places both his hands on his ears to drain out the noise of the outside world. He inhales a huge puff of air and begins reciting, Allahu Akbar (God is the greatest).

“Do you know we can’t recite the azaan over loudspeakers in mosques here?” Islamic scholar and community leader Hafiz Zia Ur Rehman said after the azaan.

According to Rehman the slow tightening of everyday life for Muslims is unfolding step by step. It began in 2021, with the meat and liquor ban around the Krishna Janmabhoomi temple. Overnight, butchers and small eateries, many of them Muslim-run, lost their licenses. Their shops were shuttered, and their trade branded as unfit for a holy city.

At the same time, the Eidgah mosque next door to the temple became the focus of a legal campaign, with Hindu petitioners pressing the courts to remove it on the grounds that it sits atop Krishna’s birthplace. Into this charged setting came another blow: petitions objecting to the azaan on loudspeakers. In May 2022, Dinesh Sharma, the treasurer of the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, filed a petition in a Mathura court seeking a ban on the use of loudspeakers for azaan at the Eidgah. He argued that the mosque, located adjacent to the Krishna Janmasthan temple, is the "sanctum sanctorum of Lord Krishna" and that azaan should not be held there. This petition reflects the RSS's broader agenda to reclaim religious sites and assert Hindu dominance in areas with significant Muslim populations.

While the RSS has held that Ayodhya was its only temple reclamation project and it won’t be joining the similar movements to take over mosques in Kashi and Mathura, that resolve appears to be in question this year. Senior RSS functionaries – including general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale and chief Mohan Bhagwat – have said that the organisation has “no objection” to members participating in these movements, which many have read as akin to support.

The Uttar Pradesh government, under chief minister Yogi Adityanath, too has supported initiatives that the Muslim community believes go against their interests. In April this year, Adityanath met with RSS functionaries, including joint general secretary Arun Kumar and other pracharaks of the Sangh, to discuss the safeguarding of the interests and issues of Hindus.

For many in Mathura’s Muslim quarters, it feels like the city is being steadily remade, piece by piece, into a landscape where their presence is barely tolerated. Following a 2022 high court order, police in Mathura served notices and dismantled sound systems at mosques and temples alike, but for Muslims the impact was sharper – amplified calls to prayer, a sound that had long stitched together their days, were abruptly silenced. Locals have alleged that even though there is ban on loudspeakers, Hindu hymns and prayers are still heard many times on speakers.

Shakir Hussain, a BAMCEF (Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation) worker, told The Wire, “Everything has changed. Over the last decade our Hindu brothers have become hateful towards us Muslims. We have played hide and seek in Janmasthan premises, no one would stop us. But now, no one would dare to go there. The distance between us and them is only increasing.”

Sonu Singh, a fruit seller near Deeg Gate, understands this from his own lens. Singh has seen intense poverty all his life and believes in karma. Singh believes that Muslims seem scared today and the reason for this, he said, is that “Hindu ab apna zor dikhaata hai, pehle aisa nahi tha. Aaj Hindu balvaan hai par iska faayeda kuch nahi hai (Hindus are showing force today, it wasn’t like this before. Today Hindus are powerful, but there is no benefit to this).”

Insensitive urban planning

The Ahle Muslimeen Kabristan is a large graveyard in Mathura’s Manoharpura. While it may seem ordinary, a large pile of garbage sits outside it. This garbage flows out of a government-made garbage dump right beside the graveyard.

Though the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016 municipal bodies are mandated to set up garbage collection points at a "safe enough distance" from residential, religious or public places,, yet the garbage outside Ahle Muslimeen Kabristan greets every funeral that makes its way in and out of the graveyard.

Mairaj Ali, district president, Bahujan Mukti Party has written to local authorities several times requesting a clean up or better management of the garbage, but his pleas have fallen on deaf ears. These complaints include reminders to authorities about their inaction. The Wire also reached out to Anil Kumar Sagar, an IAS officer at Nagar Nigam Mathura-Vrindavan, who said that the garbage is regularly picked up and insisted that it was not a dumpster, but rather a collection point.

But locals still argue that their complaints hold validity since even UP Municipal Act, 1916, 2003 and Nagar Palika By-Laws state that minimum distance of 50 metres is required for a dalab house/collection point from a religious place or public registered area; the Pollution Control Board recommends a buffer of up to 100 metres.

Similarly, outside the Gulshan E Raza Masjid at Mathura’s Masani Road, a public toilet which shares the road with the mosque premises. The proximity of the facility to the mosque disrupts the natural flow of foot traffic and creates discomfort for worshippers. In a city like Mathura, where religious sentiment and urban planning intersect closely, such examples underscore the need for careful consultation with local communities before constructing amenities near sensitive religious sites.

For locals like Shakir Hussain, who has also filed RTIs in such matters, the garbage outside graveyards and the toilets outside a mosque echo a political ideology that wants to rid Mathura of Muslims. “Their actions and inactions speak volumes about our standing as a community in the government’s eyes,” he said.

Homeless amid hate

In 2023, Chandni and Iqbal lost their home to the demolition that the state authorities conducted in Mathura’s Nai Basti. Recently as well, the authorities along with the police demolished small shacks. Over 100 homes in the neighbourhood have been brought down.

While it was alleged that the homes were illegal, most shack owners claim that they have documents. The demolition was aimed at establishing a railway line, but no such work has begun yet.

Aijaz, another victim of the purported development, asks tough questions to the state government. “Where is the railway line? Why don’t engineers visit the land for planning? Why has there been no development since then? Why are only Muslim areas used to undertake development for all?” he asked, highlighting that what is being sold as development and cultural reclamation is, in reality, a project of exclusion.

In the shadow of the Krishna Janmasthan, Mathura’s Muslims are left to navigate a city where the streets, markets and even mosques signal that they are no longer welcome.

Tarushi Aswani is an independent journalist.

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