Muslims around the world celebrate Eid ul Adha on the tenth day of Dhul Hijjah, which is to be celebrated on May 27, 2026, when they remember the willingness of Prophet Ibrahim to sacrifice everything he loved for Allah SWT. One of the most visible expressions of Islamic worship is the ritual of Qurbani, the sacrifice of a livestock animal, whose meat is distributed amongst family members, neighbors and the needy. It is an expression of faith, community, and charity. In most of the world, it is practiced with solemnity and celebration in equal measure. In India, for 200 million Muslims, it has become something else too: a legal and physical minefield that grows more dangerous with each passing year.
Twenty-five of India’s 28 states apply partial to full restrictions on bovine slaughter. The penalties are not token deterrents. According to the Gujarat Police, the minimum punishment for killing a cow is ten years and the maximum is life imprisonment. In Rajasthan, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh, cow slaughter carries two to ten years in prison. Cow protection laws are now in force in 20 states, many with provisions that empower vigilante groups to assist with enforcement, giving those groups quasi-official status and operational impunity. The target of these laws, in practice, is overwhelmingly Muslim. These laws are used against mainly Muslim cattle traders, dairy workers and families who do Qurbani. The religious significance of this cannot be overstated. In many parts of India, the Qurbani required by Islam during Eid ul Adha is a criminal act.
The enforcement of these laws has moved well beyond courtrooms. Mob lynchings of Muslims accused of cow slaughter or beef trade began rising sharply from 2015. Human Rights Watch recorded 44 of them between May 2015 and December 2018, and attacks have been occurring regularly since that time. In March 2025, two Muslim men in Ujjain were beaten by police and publicly paraded through a busy market area after being accused of cow slaughter, forced to chant humiliating slogans while an officer struck them with a baton. Senior police officials dismissed the incident as not a serious matter. Local Hindu extremist groups subsequently honoured the officers involved with garlands. That sequence, abuse, dismissal, reward, captures the institutional architecture behind these incidents with disturbing clarity.
The Broader Pattern
The cow slaughter issue is one thread in a larger fabric. IAMC’s 2026 Annual Report records that in 2025, systemic violence, hate speech, mob lynchings, targeted property demolition and attacks on democratic institutions continued, with Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and Adivasis experiencing all forms of violence. A nationwide survey of Indian police personnel found that over half of all Hindu respondents believed Muslims are “naturally prone” to committing crimes, and 22 percent favored extrajudicial encounter killings of criminals. These are not fringe views. They are the views of the institution responsible for protecting India’s Muslim population.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom designated India as a Country of Particular Concern in its 2025 Annual Report, citing the use of anti-conversion laws and cow slaughter laws to systematically target religious minorities. In 2021, India was downgraded from “Free” to “Partly Free” by Freedom House and has stayed at this rating ever since, with critics now referring to the country as a “hybrid authoritarian state. India is not a country sliding toward these designations. It has been there for years. The direction of travel has not reversed.
The contrast with the spirit of Eid ul Adha is sharp and deliberate. At the heart of the Eid al-Adha is a reminder that Muslims are one Ummah, one community of worship and one duty. The meat of Qurbani is intended for the poor, neighbor, and stranger. It’s an action that’s external, not internal. In India, the apparatus of law and vigilantism has turned that outward-facing act into a source of fear. A Muslim family performing Qurbani in Gujarat does so knowing that the wrong accusation, made to the wrong vigilante group, can result in a life sentence. That is not a legal technicality. It is a daily reality for millions of people observing a religious obligation.
India’s constitution provides for freedom of conscience and the right of all individuals to freely profess, practice, and propagate religion, and mandates a secular state that treats all religions impartially. The distance between that constitutional text and the lived experience of India’s Muslims in 2026 is the measure of what has been lost. As Eid ul Adha approaches, that distance deserves to be named clearly, documented carefully, and held to account by every institution that claims to care about religious freedom in the world’s largest democracy.
