Altaf Hussain Wani
In the Kashmir Valley, faith now comes with a barcode. The Jammu and Kashmir Police’s unprecedented surveillance exercise—collecting granular data on every mosque, imam, muezzin, and management committee member—represents not merely a security protocol but the architectural blueprint of a religious police state. This is the quantification of devotion, the bureaucratization of belief, and the ultimate expression of a project that seeks to subjugate Kashmir’s Muslim identity under the weight of spreadsheets and suspicion.
The four-page form circulated across the Valley is a masterpiece of totalitarian data harvesting. It demands not just the sectarian identity of a mosque—whether Barelvi, Deobandi, or Ahle-Hadith or shia —but its physical dimensions, construction costs, funding sources, and monthly budgets. It strips bare the financial anatomy of religious life. But the true violence lies in the three pages devoted to personal information: IMEI numbers, social media handles, ATM and credit card details, educational qualifications, and complete family profiles of those who serve the faith. This is not routine intelligence-gathering; it is the creation of a religious registry, a database of Muslim leadership designed for control, not security.
The ideological scaffolding behind this surveillance is transparent. As Kashmir’s religious leaders have warned, this is “a project of a particular right-wing ideology which wants to control religions that do not conform to the RSS worldview.” The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s vision of a Hindu Rashtra cannot tolerate autonomous Muslim religious institutions. Mosques, in this calculus, are not places of worship but potential “anti-national” incubators that must be mapped, monitored, and managed. The state that facilitates massive, state-sponsored Hindu pilgrimages to Amarnath with military precision simultaneously treats Muslim religious expression as a national security threat requiring biometric-level surveillance.
This asymmetry reveals the core hypocrisy of India’s religious freedom discourse. While Hindu shrines operate with generous state patronage, Muslim religious institutions face a dual system of control and suspicion. The Waqf Board, meant to protect Muslim endowments, has been systematically hollowed out and brought under direct government control, its properties sequestered and its autonomy eroded. Meanwhile, Hindu religious trusts operate with impunity, their finances opaque, their leadership unvetted by police intelligence. The Tirupati Temple, with its billions in annual revenue, faces no police demands for IMEI numbers of its priests. The Vaishno Devi Shrine Board, which receives state support for infrastructure and security, is never asked to declare its “ideological sect.” This is not governance; it is the systematic subjugation of Muslim institutional life.
The symbolic colonization of sacred space reached its zenith with the installation of the Ashok Chakra at the Hazratbal Dargah—Kashmir’s most revered Sufi shrine. This act of placing India’s national emblem at a site of profound spiritual significance was not benign patriotism; it was the physical marking of territory, the state’s seal pressed onto the very heart of Kashmiri Muslim identity. It announced that even the most intimate spaces of worship are subject to sovereign appropriation. When combined with the current surveillance program, it becomes clear that the goal is not just to monitor but to domesticate, to transform mosques from centers of community autonomy into nodes of state surveillance.
International law provides no shelter for this surveillance state. Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which India is a party, guarantees freedom of religion in absolute terms, subject only to limitations “necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals.” The mosque profiling cannot meet this test. It is a blanket, indiscriminate collection of data on an entire religious community, not a targeted response to specific threats. The UN Human Rights Committee has explicitly warned that restrictions on religious freedom must be proportionate and non-discriminatory. Kashmir’s program fails on both counts, targeting Muslims exclusively while treating their religious leadership as a security threat by default.
The psychological warfare embedded in this surveillance cannot be overstated. When an imam must consider whether his sermon will trigger a data review, when a donor fears his contribution will flag him as a “funding source” for extremism, when a young man hesitates to attend Friday prayers because his presence becomes a data point—faith itself becomes a calculated risk. This is the intended outcome: to make Muslim identity synonymous with suspicion, to transform religious practice into a privilege granted by the state rather than a right inherent to the believer. The forms demand not just compliance but complicity in one’s own surveillance.
The global community’s silence is complicity. Democracies that lecture the world on religious freedom must confront India’s mosque surveillance program. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief should demand access to Kashmir. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom has designated India a “Country of Particular Concern” for three consecutive years, yet sanctions remain absent, diplomatic pressure muted. This silence emboldens the surveillance state. Every unchallenged violation becomes precedent; every ignored warning becomes permission.
Resistance must become transnational. Kashmiri diaspora communities must file parallel complaints with the UN Human Rights Committee. Islamic human rights organizations should pursue cases at the International Court of Justice. Digital rights groups must expose how this data integrates with India’s larger surveillance architecture, including the Aadhaar biometric system and facial recognition networks, creating a totalitarian ecosystem where religious identity is algorithmically criminalized.
Ultimately, the mosque forms are not about gathering information; they are about demonstrating power. They announce that in Modi’s India, Muslim faith is a problem to be solved through data analytics and ideological re-education. They signal that Kashmiri Muslim identity must be digitized, dissected, and domesticated. But faith, unlike data, cannot be contained. The same mosques that police now catalog have survived empires and resisted colonizers. The muezzin’s call, now monitored by IMEI trackers, still echoes across the Valley five times a day, a reminder that some frequencies remain beyond the state’s capacity to jam.
The question for the world is stark: Will we allow the 21st century’s largest democracy to become its most sophisticated religious surveillance state? The forms are printed, the data collection begun. But the final entry in this database has yet to be written. It will be written by those who refuse to comply, by those who turn their mosques into fortresses of freedom, and by a generation that chooses faith over fear. In that choice lies Kashmir’s liberation—and perhaps ours.
Writer is chairman Kashmir Institute of International Relation and can be reached at;
chairman@kiir.org.pk saleeemwani@hotmail.com and X @sultan1913