Ali’s brother told reporters that police arrested him to prevent him from giving his statement to the judicial commission.

It is the corruption matter involving 2006-batch IAS officer Abhishek Prakash that has really got tongues wagging in Lucknow.

"I only have a handful of books now. I gave away most of them after the demolition,” Ali Ahmed Fatmi, former head of the Urdu department of Allahabad University, told The Wire.

The court said that the crime brought shame to humanity as well as to the legal system.

The official stand, while banning the event, was in tune with the long-held views of the RSS and its affiliates who have concertedly tried to superimpose the fable of Ghazi Mian into current politics and project him as a villainous character.

Shamim, a tailor who was an eyewitness to the incident, told The Wire that he saw a group of boys forcibly throw colour on the now deceased Sharif, while raining down slaps on him when he objected.

“This court finds that no suitable reply has been given by the ASI for denying to proceed for whitewashing of exterior part of the alleged masjid during the holy month of Ramzan," Justice Rohit Ranjan Agarwal said.

Two cases have come to light from Uttar Pradesh’s Fatehpur and Bijnor where Muslim women and their male relatives have been accused of luring Hindu men to convert to Islam through the promise and allurement of marriage.

Hafiz Shakeel Shamsi, the imam of a mosque in Punjabiyan locality in Chandausi area of Sambhal, was booked on the charge of public nuisance and disobeying the orders given by public servants.

Adityanath made light of the situation and even joked about the officer's wrestling background. “He spoke like a pehelwan,” he said.

Nobody was allowed to click photos or make videos. The media was not allowed to cover the program. All these details made it possible that the stampede could have involved a conspiracy, the commission's report said.

The sequence of events indicate that the BSP is in chaos and its leader has lost the plot.

"We didn’t let [the deaths] get highlighted so that there was no panic,” Adityanath said, admitting that at least two stampedes took place on the same day.

The high court ordered the inspection after the managing committee of the centrally-protected mosque approached it with a request to allow it to carry out maintenance, cleaning, white washing and lighting work in the Masjid for Ramazan, which starts from March 2.

Unhappy that the two intended to marry each other in a Christian ceremony, the village council convinced the woman's father to file a false case under the state's anti-conversion law.

The ASI report would need to state if there was any requirement of whitewashing and maintenance or repair work in the mosque.

The news of the two incidents from western Uttar Pradesh prompted Member of Parliament Chandra Shekhar Aazad to describe them as “planned terror against Dalits” in the state.

Victims ranged from common devotees and sadhus to people of privilege and authority, local residents, Indians from other states and foreign tourists.

Further, the chief minister confirmed that 37, not 30 people have died in the stampedes on Mauni Amavasya.

When confronted with the question of Urdu's omission, chief minister Adityanath passed a communally laced comment against the language.