NEHTAUR, Uttar Pradesh — The Uttar Pradesh police shot 20-year-old Mohammed Suleman dead in the afternoon of December 20. At midnight, his father was called to the closest police station to discuss funeral arrangements.

Suleman’s corpse was found by his family at a busy intersection in Nehtaur, a bustling urban settlement in Bijnor district, shortly after the state police trained their guns on a crowd of mostly Muslim men raising slogans against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The demonstration in Nehtaur was part of hundreds of similar protests across the country.


Immediately after his death, Suleman’s family took his body to Bijnor’s district hospital, where the corpse was held by the police pending a post-mortem. Suleman’s post-mortem would be conducted in the early hours of December 21, a police officer told his father Zahid Hussain, but the body would be released to his grieving family on the condition that he be buried immediately and at a spot far away from Nehtaur, where Suleman and his family lived. No friends or mourners could be called for the funeral, and the abbreviated ceremony would be conducted under strict police bandobast.

“The police said, ‘You are rioters, you will cause a riot at the funeral’,” said Suleman’s elder brother Shoaib, who accompanied his father to the police station. “They said, ‘Just dig a hole anywhere and bury him.’” Suleman’s family had to patiently explain their death rituals to the disinterested police force.


A little after 7 am on December 21, Suleman’s body was loaded into a police vehicle and accompanied by a police convoy that navigated the circuitous backroads from Bijnor to a cemetery in a village called Baghdad Ansar, where his grandmother lived.

On the same night, another desperate family from Nehtaur was conducting a similar negotiation with the police. Anas Hussain, the 21-year-old father of an 8-month-old child, had been shot dead when he stepped out of a narrow alley and into the path of a bullet most likely fired by the police. Here too, the police were refusing to hand over the body until the family chose a spot far away from Nehtaur.


Eventually, the police brought the body to a cemetery in a village called Mithan, and stood guard over the body as Anas’s brothers dug a grave, as Anas’s father heated water to wash his son’s body, as Anas’s uncle organised a wooden frame to lower the corpse into the grave.

“Most of our family wasn’t allowed to see Anas one last time,” said his father Arshad Hussain, his eyes welling up with tears.