The Eid Day Massacre of Indian Muslims

The Eid Day Massacre of Indian Muslims

By Abdul Malik Mujahid

Forty-six years ago today, on August 13, 1980, the Indian police turned their rifles on Muslims gathered for Eid prayer in Moradabad. I was so shocked by that massacre that I visited India and began studying India in 1980, the same year. Years later my book on India won an outstanding academic book of the year award by the American Library Association. I have spent decades since asking a question that never gets easier to answer: why does a day meant for joy, for gratitude, for community, keep becoming a day of Muslim blood in India?

A day of prayer, not provocation

Eid al-Fitr marks the end of a month of fasting. Families dress in new clothes, scent themselves with itar, non-alcoholic perfume, and gather, men, women, and children together, at the Eidgah for the congregational prayer that closes Ramadan. That is what tens of thousands of Moradabad’s Muslims were doing on the morning of August 13, 1980: standing in rows for Salat, not staging an uprising. Accounts describe between forty thousand and sixty thousand worshippers filling the Eidgah and the streets around it that morning.

How many died

No one has ever produced a definitive count, and that itself is part of the story: a massacre that India’s institutions declined to fully investigate cannot be fully tallied. Estimates from journalists and researchers who have revisited the case range from roughly one hundred to as many as a thousand Muslims killed when the Armed Constabulary opened fire on the Eidgah crowd, in a closed ground with a single exit. The government of the day ordered an inquiry that was left incomplete; a fuller investigative report reportedly did not become public for over four decades.

Hiding reports

The Eid massacre followed the pattern of the Hyderabad massacre of Muslims, when the Indian Armed Forces invaded Hyderabad on September 13, 1948. A report was submitted in January 1949 but was not made public until 2013, sixty-five years later. The government report conservatively estimated that between 27,000 and 40,000 Muslim civilians were killed in cold blood during and after the operation. Independent observers and contemporary scholars, such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, estimated the overall death toll across the region at anywhere between 50,000 and 200,000.

Blaming the victims, then and since

What followed Moradabad in 1980 is a pattern any student of anti-Muslim violence in India will recognize: the burden of explanation is placed on the Muslims who were killed, not on the men who killed them. It happened in Hyderabad in 1948, where a state massacre was buried for sixty-five years rather than acknowledged. It happened in Moradabad in 1980, where the flashpoint was said to be a pig that wandered into the Eidgah grounds, and the massacre was folded into official accounts as a “Hindu-Muslim riot” or “communal riot” rather than what witnesses and later researchers have called a “calculated, cold-blooded massacre” carried out by a communal police force. And it happened again in Gujarat in 2002, where the Godhra train fire was used to justify days of organized violence against Muslims across the state, an atrocity Human Rights Watch later documented under the title “We Have No Orders to Save You,” a statement by the police officers who stood by and watched. In each case, the community that was attacked was recast as the community that provoked its own attack.

Where this pattern comes from

That recasting is not accidental. It has an ideological root, and it is documented in the RSS’s own founding literature, not only in the accusations of its critics. M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS’s second chief, wrote in his 1939 book We, or Our Nationhood Defined that Nazi Germany’s “purging” of Jews to preserve racial purity was, in his words, “a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.” Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, president of the Hindu Mahasabha through the height of Nazi power in Europe, argued in a 1940 speech that “Nazism proved undeniably the savior of Germany under the set of circumstances Germany was placed in,” and drew an explicit comparison between Germany’s Jewish minority and India’s Muslim minority.

Researchers have followed that thread forward. Angana Chatterji, a scholar at UC Berkeley, has traced how the RSS’s founding admiration for Nazi race theory shaped its modern vision of who counts as fully belonging in India. The human rights organization Justice For All has published its own report under the same title, “The Nazification of India,” arguing that the RSS’s paramilitary structure, its founding texts, and its current treatment of Muslims trace a continuous line back to that 1939 admiration. (Full disclosure: the author is the volunteer president of Justice For All.)

A “Hindu-fascist enterprise”

The Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy, writing about the bulldozing of Muslim homes in India, put it starkly: the country, she said, is “transitioning pretty brazenly into a criminal Hindu fascist enterprise.” She has also pointed directly at the RSS as the organizing force behind that shift, arguing that its founding ideologues openly admired Hitler and likened Indian Muslims to German Jews. The RSS is the parent organization of the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s ruling party; the same movement that produced Golwalkar’s praise for Nazi race policy now sits at the center of India’s government.

A visa denial to Modi that outlasted a decade of silence

It is worth remembering that the United States itself once judged this record too serious to ignore. In 2005, the State Department revoked Narendra Modi’s US visa and denied him entry under a law that bars officials found responsible for severe violations of religious freedom, a decision tied directly to the 2002 Gujarat violence carried out on his watch as chief minister. That denial stood for nearly a decade, until Modi’s 2014 election as prime minister prompted Washington to reverse course and receive him as a head of state. The reversal changed Modi’s welcome in Washington; it did not change the record that prompted the ban in the first place.

RSS continues to promote anti-Muslim hate

The pattern set in 1939 did not stay in the past. A South Asia Justice Campaign tracker recorded at least 44 Muslims killed in India in anti-Muslim hate incidents in just the first seven months of 2026 alone: 19 in state actions such as police encounters and custodial deaths, and 25 in mob violence and vigilante attacks. The same period saw mosques and madrasas demolished as “illegal encroachments” in BJP-run states, Muslim-owned homes and shops bulldozed after a protest, and Muslim citizens publicly labeled “infiltrators” by senior state officials, language that blurs the line between India’s own Muslim citizens and undocumented migrants and primes the public to see Muslims as outsiders in their own country.

How many massacres are too many

India’s own Home Ministry told Parliament that in just the four years ending in 2017, the country recorded 2,920 official “communal incidents,” which killed 389 people. Buried inside that bland bureaucratic category are roughly two dozen major massacres that most people outside the affected communities have never heard named, most investigated late, incompletely, or not at all. The most recent is the February 2020 Delhi riots, in which 53 people, most of them Muslim, were killed over three days, eleven mosques and five madrasas were burned or vandalized, and a Delhi Minorities Commission inquiry concluded the violence was “well planned.” Five years on, most victims are still waiting for anyone to be held accountable.

RSS chief visit worth questioning

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat is scheduled to visit the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom starting August 25, 2026, as part of the RSS’s centenary-year outreach, with a headline appearance before a large Hindu American gathering in New York on August 29. He will be welcomed and asked to reflect on unity and civic engagement. What he is unlikely to be asked, in any of those rooms, is a direct question about the organization he leads: about Golwalkar’s praise for the Jewish purge, about the mosques and churches demolished under BJP state governments, or about the Muslims, Christians, and Dalits who make up the overwhelming majority of victims in India’s “communal” incidents. If American institutions, journalists, and elected officials extended the same scrutiny to visiting foreign leaders that they extend to other organizations with a documented record like this one, Bhagwat’s visit would look very different than a centenary celebration.

Why this history still matters

Moradabad is not an isolated horror sealed off in 1980. It is a template: a Muslim gathering, a manufactured pretext, state violence, and then a public narrative that blames the dead for their own deaths. Recognizing that template in Moradabad is what makes it possible to recognize it again in Hyderabad, in Gujarat, in Delhi, and in whatever the next manufactured pretext turns out to be. Forty-six years later, the least we owe the worshippers who died at that Eidgah is to keep telling the story accurately, and to keep asking why a day of prayer keeps ending in bloodshed.