On October 30, 2025, police in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, announced a stunning reversal in a case involving inflammatory graffiti. Days earlier, the district was gripped by outrage after graffiti reading “I love Mohammad” was found spray-painted on the walls of at least four, and by some accounts five, temples in the villages of Bhagwanpur and Bulaqigarh.
The act, discovered on the morning of Saturday, October 25, 2025, was immediately seen as a deliberate communal provocation. Given the charged atmosphere in the state over the “I Love Muhammad” slogan, which had led to widespread police crackdowns in other districts, the incident was treated with extreme seriousness. Local Hindu residents and right-wing organisations were incensed. A formal police complaint (FIR) was swiftly lodged by Gyanendra Singh Chauhan, the All-India Vice President of the Karni Sena.
Based on this complaint, Aligarh police initially registered a case against eight Muslim men from the locality. The men named in the FIR were Mustaqeem, Gul Mohammad, Sulaiman, Sonu, Allahbaksh, Hameed, and Yousuf. After the incident, heavy police forces were deployed to the villages to prevent any outbreak of violence as tensions soared.
However, as investigators, led by Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Neeraj Kumar Jadaun, began their work, they noticed inconsistencies. According to a report in The Times of India, the officers observed that the slogans were “misspelled, and all in the same way.” This misspelling was crucial. It did not match the stencilling or lettering style of the “I Love Muhammad” banners and posters that had been seen during protests and processions in other cities, such as Bareilly. This discrepancy led investigators to suspect “mischief” and the possibility of a different motive.
Police investigation
Police teams pivoted their investigation. Shifting from the assumption of a communal motive, they employed technical surveillance and began examining local disputes. Their work led them to a group of men from the Hindu community.
On October 30, SSP Neeraj Jadaun held a press briefing to announce the arrest of four men, Zeeshanth Singh (also reported as Jishant Kumar), Akash Saraswat (or Akash Kumar), Dilip Sharma (or Dilip Kumar), and Abhishek Saraswat. A fifth accused, identified as Rahul, was reported as absconding.
Aligarh: Abhishek Saraswat (s/o Virendra Sharma, Aakash (s/o Santosh Saraswat), Dileep Kumar (s/o Ramraj Sharma) & Zeeshanth Kumar (s/o Yashpal Singh) arrested by UP’s Aligarh police for allegedly writing “I love Mohammed” on temple walls to frame Muslim neighbours due to… pic.twitter.com/f7l9DHhxQA
— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) October 30, 2025
The motive, police revealed, was not communal hatred. It was a calculated conspiracy born from a personal vendetta.
SSP Jadaun stated that the main accused, Jishant Singh, had a “personal dispute” with Mustakeem, one of the Muslim men who was initially named in the FIR. Media reports specified the conflict was related to a land-related rivalry. In a deliberate and malicious attempt to settle this score, Jishant Singh allegedly conspired with his friends to paint the inflammatory slogans on the temple walls. Their goal was to “falsely implicate” Mustakeem and his associates, leveraging the existing communal tensions surrounding the “I Love Muhammad” slogan to ensure their rivals were arrested and publicly disgraced.
“The investigation found that the graffiti was not a communal act but a deliberate attempt to implicate others due to a land-related rivalry,” SSP Jadaun said, as reported
The revelation was a profound shock to the local community. It demonstrated how easily personal conflicts could be masked as communal ones, with perpetrators willing to risk widespread violence to settle a score. Even before the arrests, some had suspected a setup.
On October 25, Samajwadi Party leader Zia Ur Rehman Barq had alleged that the graffiti was part of a “well-thought-out conspiracy” and stated, “If an impartial investigation is conducted, it will be clear that no Muslim person was involved in this act.”
#WATCH | Sambhal, UP: On Moradabad Madrasa asking for a virginity certificate from girls, SP MP Zia ur Rahman Barq says, “We also found out about this through social media. However, I still believe that it has not happened at any of our Madarsa or religious institutions where a… pic.twitter.com/0f3afPBxnJ
— ANI (@ANI) October 25, 2025
Following the arrests, SSP Jadaun confirmed that the case registered against the eight Muslim men would be withdrawn, and the four arrested men were booked under relevant sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 for promoting enmity between groups and disturbing public peace.
Background: the “I Love Muhammad” campaign and state crackdown
The Aligarh incident did not happen in a vacuum. It was the volatile endpoint of a controversy that had been building for nearly two months, starting with a simple expression of faith.
The timeline begins on September 4, 2025, in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. As part of the celebrations for Eid Milad-un-Nabi, the birthday of Prophet Muhammad, some young Muslim men in the Syed Nagar locality of Rawatpur put up a decorative light board at the entrance of a lane. It bore a simple message in English: “I Love Muhammad.”
As per a report in The Wire, this act drew objections from some local right-wing groups. They claimed the banner was a “new tradition” and alleged it was a “deliberate provocation” because it was placed on a public road near a gate also used for Hindu festival processions like Ram Navami.
On September 9, police in Kanpur registered an FIR against 24 people (nine named and 15 unidentified) for allegedly “disturbing communal harmony.” A local prayer leader, Shabnoor Alam, who was named in the FIR, told The Wire that police had asked him to help convince the crowd to move the board. Another accused, Mohammad Siraj, stated, “Last year, we displayed the same message on a cloth banner, and no one raised objections. This year, we used a light board, and suddenly people started protesting. I don’t understand why.”
The flashpoint: violence in Bareilly
The police action in Kanpur transformed the slogan from a festive decoration into a symbol of protest. In response to what they saw as the criminalisation of their faith and expressions, Muslim groups in other cities began displaying the slogan as an act of religious expression and defiance.
This set the stage for a major confrontation in Bareilly. Maulana Tauqeer Raza Khan, a prominent local cleric and leader of the Ittehad-e-Millat Council (IMC), called for a large protest after Friday prayers on September 26, 2025. The protest was called to oppose the police crackdowns and alleged derogatory remarks made against the Prophet.
Despite authorities denying permission for a march, thousands gathered at the Islamia Ground. The situation quickly spiralled out of control. Clashes erupted between protesters and police. Reports from the ground described stone-pelting from the crowd and even alleged gunfire, which prompted a heavy lathi charge from security forces to disperse the gathering.
The aftermath was severe. Maulana Tauqeer Raza Khan and seven others were arrested and later sent to 14-day judicial custody. As many as ten FIRs were registered across Bareilly, each naming between 150 and 200 Muslims, with over 2,500 people accused in total. By late September, the Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), a non-governmental organisation, had already documented at least 21 FIRs nationwide related to the campaign, with 1,324 Muslims named and 38 arrested. In Meerut, five men were arrested simply for putting up a poster with the slogan, as per a report in The New Indian Express.
The counter-campaign and political rhetoric
As the “I Love Muhammad” slogan became a national controversy, it triggered a counter-campaign from right-wing organisations. In Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency, activists from a saffron outfit called the Sanatan Sena began pasting posters with the slogan “I love Mahadev” on walls, temples, and mutts.
Jagadguru Shankaracharya Narendrananda, who led the effort, told Deccan Herald that the “saint community will respond to the fundamentalists through these posters” and that some elements were “trying to foment communal tension” with the “I Love Muhammad” posters.
This “poster war” highlighted a sharp political and social divide. Political leaders like AIMIM Chief Asaduddin Owaisi and PDP President Mehbooba Mufti publicly questioned the discrepancy.
I LOVE MOHAMMAD ﷺ @adgzonekanpur ये जुर्म नहीं है। अगर है तो इसकी हर सज़ा मंज़ूर है।
तुम पर मैं लाख जान से क़ुर्बान या-रसूल
बर आएँ मेरे दिल के भी अरमान या-रसूलक्यों दिल से मैं फ़िदा न करूँ जान या-रसूल
रहते हैं इस में आप के अरमान या-रसूल https://t.co/8kKWY22zHC— Asaduddin Owaisi (@asadowaisi) September 15, 2025
They asked why expressing “I Love Muhammad” was being met with FIRs, lathi charges, and arrests, while slogans like “I Love Mahadev” or “Jai Shree Ram” were seen as acceptable expressions of faith.
Jharkhand Minister Irfan Ansari remarked, “Just like people who believe in Sanatan Dharma, write ‘I love Ram’… and I don’t have any problem, I love Prophet Mohammed… I cannot understand how these three words can be the cause of arrests.”
#WATCH | Ranchi | Jharkhand Minister Irfan Ansari says, “Just like people who believe in Sanatan Dharma, write ‘I love Ram’, ‘I love Hanuman’, ‘I love Krishna’, ‘I love Sita’ or ‘I love Radha’, and I don’t have any problem, I love Prophet Mohammed and Islam as I belong to… pic.twitter.com/9s66IAMrnN
— ANI (@ANI) September 25, 2025
The controversy was further inflamed by the rhetoric of high-ranking officials. On September 28, 2025, in the wake of the Bareilly violence, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath made a series of widely reported public statements. Speaking at an event, he warned against “vandalism in the name of faith” and promised severe retribution.
“If you trouble us, we will not spare you,” he stated, using the Hindi phrase, “chedhoge to chodenge nahi.” He promised action that would be remembered by “future generations” and said that “denting and painting must be done.”
Civil rights groups and media critics argued that this language, which was amplified by national news channels, effectively framed the display of the “I Love Muhammad” slogan not as an issue of religious freedom, but as a severe law-and-order problem. This, they argued, legitimised the harsh police crackdowns across the state.
The Aligarh incident, therefore, serves as a crucial case study. It exposed the danger of a high-tension environment where a slogan had become so loaded with political and communal baggage that individuals felt they could weaponise it to settle a personal score, confident that the blame would fall along pre-existing fault lines. It was only through a police investigation that looked beyond the obvious communal narrative that the true, and more personal, conspiracy was brought to light.
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Free speech, even in bad taste, is protected if no incitement to violence: HP HC