New Delhi: The lanes in Khoda, Ghaziabad, are so narrow that everybody is in everybody else’s life. Wires hang low overhead. Houses stand wall-to-wall. People spill out into the street because there is nowhere else to go. You would be hard-pressed to see this area as part of the National Capital Territory, even if it is minutes away from upmarket Mayur Vihar neighbourhoods.In the first lane of this locality in Ghaziabad, a mourning gathering virtually fills the lane. Outside, on the main road, police personnel and media workers choke an already congested market street.This is the scene outside the lane in Khoda Colony where lives the family of Surya Chauhan, a 16-year-old who died from stab wounds allegedly inflicted by 19-year-old Asad, from the same locality, five days earlier. On May 28, the day of Eid, Surya was stabbed after meeting Asad and a group of other youths. He died in hospital the following day. About 24 hours later, Asad was killed in a police encounter.Between the killing and the encounter, however, another battle had begun in Khoda – over how the incident should be understood.Life in Khoda, where the working classes must endure sub-standard services, and poor quality of life, is now a hub of communal speeches, June 1, 2026. Photo: Pragya Singh.Hindutva outfits arriveNumerous Hindu organisations and ‘VIPs’ have parked themselves at Surya’s doorstep since the stabbing, where they hold ‘meetings’ all day, explaining Surya’s killing as an attack ‘on the Hindu community’ – ignoring the voices that say they were friends who fell into a dispute. The street had broken into at least five large gatherings of Hindutva activists making speeches about Hinduism under threat from Muslims, surrounded by mediapersons and locals.Those who have been here include BJP leader from Meerut Sangeet Som, who gave a statement calling Muslims who attacked Surya ‘jihadi’, Reena Bhati, another BJP leader, arrives almost daily at Surya’s home, including one visit with supporters (The Wire recorded this interaction) who asked the administration to evict “Mulla/outsiders/tenants” from the lane where Surya lived, or else the local women would do so.“This was a fight over religion,” said Madhav Bajrangi, a local office-bearer of the Rashtriya Hanuman Dal, who said he wanted Khoda renamed after Surya and called on Hindus from across the country to visit the locality “all year, every day”. Madhav was present outside Surya’s mother’s house on both June 1 and 2, making tall claims on both days, as well as linking his presence with “national service”.Harinder Singh, BJP Pradesh Karyakarini Mantri (Member, State Executive Committee, Uttar Pradesh) and head of the Maharaja Suraj Mal Samaj Utthan Sansthan, says, “We trust that the government will do what has been done to Asad to the other accused as well. Their houses should also be demolished.” He goes on: “People say those who study in madrasa become jihadi.”Former Khoda councillor Reena Bhati (in greyish-blue shalwar-kameez with white abstract patterns), a well-known BJP leader in the area, arrives with supporters who want ‘Muslim tenants’ evicted, June 2, 2026. Photo: Pragya Singh.There is no evidence or claim linking Asad to any madarsa (school). The May 28 attack has been officially recorded as just that – an attack by Asad on Surya – in the police FIR filed by Surya’s brother, Yash. The Wire has a copy of the FIR, which attributes no reason or motive, except that it was an attempt by Asad to take Surya’s life, who was in hospital, battling for his life at the time.The complaint filed by Surya’s family to police, as recorded in the FIR on May 28, 2026.“All six homes should be bulldozed,” said Saroj, Surya’s grieving mother, sitting next to Singh on a mattress laid out in front of a small pedestal on which are Surya’s garlanded photo and a tiny suggestion – or cry – for help – a QR code for anyone willing to assist the family. Surya’s family lives in a rented flat in Gali Number 1, and Saroj earns 6-8,000 a month, working in a private sector job in Greater Noida. Her older son, said to keep poor health, does odd jobs, as did Surya.“One of the killers has been killed in an encounter. Six more are left,” says she. Like many in the locality, she cites the number of attackers from what they hear or on the basis of a CCTV recording, allegedly of the stabbing incident, which has unofficially been circulating, in which a group of 7 is seen grappling on a street – not on the basis of actual knowledge of what transpired between the boys on the Eid afternoon. The numbers people cite, therefore, vary from 4 to 6 to 7 in some cases.Saroj rejects the suggestion of a preexisting dispute between the two boys, Surya and Asad. “There was no old matter,” she said. “They were not friends.” Her grief, however, quickly merged with anger at Muslims as a community. “Hindus and Muslims can never be friends,” she said.An ABVP worker, a still youthful college-going woman, sits behind Saroj on the same mattress in the heat. Chaudhary is to her right. With Chaudhary are members of other so-called Hindu outfits.Multiple groups of Hindutva supporters raise slogans and make hate speeches about Muslims outside the house in Khoda, Ghaziabad, where Surya Chauhan lived. Pictured above is a young member of one such outfit, on June 2, 2026. Photo: Pragya Singh.So, The Wire team asks Saroj’s daughter, Vishakha, if we can speak separately, away from the gathering of BJP, ABVP and other Hindu organisation workers who have surrounded the family since Surya’s death. She agrees and leads us inside. Now, away from the crowd, a more complicated account emerges.Surya’s family and the gender divide in ‘Hindu’ discourseVishakha insists the two boys were never friends, “I would have known,” she says. “Asad lived a few lanes away. They might have been talking, but they were not friends.”“There was a small issue that arose between them [Surya and Asad], I heard from my mother, seven or eight months ago.”Vishakha, Surya Chauhan’s sister, greiving her brother’s loss as crowds chant angry Hindutva slogans outside. June 1, 2026. Photo: Pragya Singh.She does not know what the older argument was about, but, she says, her mother had intervened at the time and asked them to “stop being friends”. This implies a kind of friendship existed between the two. “’You stay together and you fight each other too’,” she recalls her mother telling Surya about his association with Asad. “So their friendship was ended by my mother – for some time, there was no interaction between them.”The claim doing the rounds is that Surya was asked by Asad whether he had “ever seen a goat being slaughtered”, and then he was killed. This is something Vishakha, too, has heard.But when asked why he would attend an Eid-related event at all, since, going by what is being said outside her own house by members of Hindutva outfits, the Hindus and Muslims cannot see eye to eye, Vishakha notes that while the women in her family are vegetarian, “Boys, who spend time with friends, do pick up the habit of consuming meat”.Not just that, according to Vishakha, Surya agreed to meet Asad on the day of the stabbing because Asad had invoked their earlier friendship – “Dost ke liye nahi karogey itna bhi? (Won’t you come to meet an old friend?)”Vishakha is also reserved in her responses about the presence of Hindu organisations around the family since her brother’s death. Did she know or recognise the members of these groups? She nods vaguely in response, but the owner of her family’s rental flat, Kamlesh, is more forthcoming on why the groups are there. “My son Pavan and I know them very well. We have very good relations with them,” she says, explaining that Pavan participates in jagrans organised by the ‘Rashtriya Hanuman Dal’ and was often in the company of members of such groups.When asked whether Surya also worked with Hindutva outfits, Vishakha says, “Yes, that is true,” and adds that he got the Hanuman Chalisa read at Hanuman Dal events and provided his services – voluntary work – at a gaushala. Could that line of work be the reason for conflict with Asad? Vishakha responds: “Maybe.”But Pavan Lodhi, Kamlesh’s son, sees the killing through a different lens than both the women. The Muslims, he says, have “large families” and are trying to create a “stronghold” in localities like Khoda. “In a Hindu family, if there are two children, they all work hard to do better,” he says. “In a Muslim family, if there are 12 children… what would they not do to keep that power?”Unlike the women, Lodhi’s focus was not on Surya and Asad – he only said what the Hindutva groups outside were saying. “They will give their children the wrong instruction,” he says of Muslims. “They will say, go to madrasa, use knives.” Asked why he was blaming an entire religion for the actions of a handful of young men – or just Asad – he cites incidents in Uttam Nagar, Faridabad and elsewhere, which the media had reported in sensational terms.“This killing was a conspiracy,” he says. “Otherwise, why was he killed on the day of Eid?”Kamlesh, Pavan Lodhi and Vishakha at Surya Chauhan’s home in Khoda, June 1, 2026. Photo: Siddhi Chouhan.Pavan repeats boilerplate hate speeches spread by the Hindutva ecosystem on the record. But when away from the camera and the pen, he whispers to this reporter: “I make 12,000 rupees a month as an ambulance driver. In these trying times of high prices, only I know how I make ends meet.”Neither Vishakha nor Kamlesh follows Lodhi down the path of ruing their circumstances, painting the Muslims or Islam black, or seeking revenge.Both women insist they had never witnessed communal tensions until Surya died. Vishakha says her family has lived in this lane for 17 years without a problem. Kamlesh recalls years of peaceful coexistence. “We never had any fight with a Muslim – nor with a Hindu,” says Kamlesh.“Look,” says Kamlesh, “We are business people, and so are the Muslims. We would exchange greetings with each other. Yes, neither they came to our homes, nor did we go to theirs.”“If it was a fight between two persons, our boy would have killed him,” Kamlesh claims. “But there were seven attacking one,” she adds, getting the number of alleged attackers wrong – a recurrent issue among Khoda residents.The other thing rankling Vishakha is why Surya was called out by Asad on Eid – she is unable to distance the festival from the stabbing, and she cannot understand why it was done in the “name of friendship”. She also wonders why the Muslims, including her neighbours, had not visited them so far. She says Hindutva outfits told her that a Muslim neighbour threw a packet of meat from a top floor on the day her brother was taken to hospital.And in response to her doubts, Pavan Lodhi, who calls himself an awakened Hindu, and wants other Hindus to “awaken and organise” against Muslims, and who participates in events of the Rashtriya Hanuman Dal and other Hindutva groups – is ever-present with “explanations”. The blame, according to his reasoning, always falls on the Muslim side.Many voices in Khoda – not all are being heardThe version of events heard in and around Surya’s home is not the only one circulating in Khoda.On June 1, after meeting Surya’s family, The Wire had sought to speak to Asad’s relatives, neighbours and friends. By then, however, the house his family had occupied until a few months earlier had been sealed by the administration. Asad’s father Nawab and brother and even his mother had been arrested by police and taken into judicial custody.Local residents outside the sealed house told The Wire that Asad’s father had moved out of that house months earlier, after selling the property to a builder, though the transaction was incomplete.The official notice on the door of the house – the last in a cul de sac – claims that the structure was illegally built on government land. This notice has unsettled the others in the neighbourhood as well. Ashfaq Khan is worried that his sister’s adjoining house would be damaged if the authorities moved in with bulldozers – not unusual in UP, where the chief minister is “famous” for bulldozing the homes of Muslims and the poor.Standing in the narrow lane outside the sealed property, Ashfaq said the stabbing was being used to build political momentum for small-time rabble rousers.A silent street in Khoda where mostly Muslims live, June 1, 2026. Khoda is a crime-prone area, locals say, and streets empty fast after nightfall. However, the closure of markets has hurt local businesses since May 28. Photo: Pragya Singh.Madan Singh, who lives directly opposite Asad’s old home, says he watched the family struggle with the boy for years. “Khoob pitai kartey they woh Asad ki,” he says of Asad’s father – he used to beat him often. Singh says the father was afraid of where the boy was headed. “The boy was fine earlier. Then he fell into bad company.” Madan pauses. “But what happened between the two boys, who can say?”Hussain, a resident of the same lane, says, “What Asad did was wrong, and he has been punished for it, as he should be.” He adds, “Badnaam toh kar diya Musalmaan ko (the Muslims have got a bad name because of what Asad did).”Hussain does not think the fight between Asad and Surya is “proof” of a Hindu-Muslim conflict. “I have lived here since 2006 and nothing like this ever happened,” he said. “Both of them used to spend time together in a group of friends.”“There was no religious angle to their fight,” said Ashfaq. “All kinds of layers are being added, to give this matter a religious colour.”On June 1, during The Wire team’s first visit to the troubled lanes of Khoda, most Muslim residents declined to be interviewed. Others went silent when the camera rolled or the notebook was flipped open. The few who spoke, however, openly rejected the communal framing of the incident.Prominent among them is Mohammad Afzal, the councillor of Ward 31, where both boys lived. The Wire met Afzal on June 2. He attributed the Muslim’s refusal to speak to fear. “The Muslims are scared,” he said, “they are terrified of all they are hearing the members of [Hindutva] outfits say about them.”“Still, I believe that when Asad has done something wrong, the Muslims must not be afraid of saying so. I have been talking to them about this, and about collecting aid for the family of Surya,” he said.But the silence of Surya’s Muslim neighbours began to break on June 2, after authorities arrived to seal a madrasa in a nearby lane. Residents and clerics now spoke up, almost tearfully, in shock, saying neither Asad nor the other accused had any connection to the institution. Many said they saw it as a collective punishment for the actions of one young man and his friends.A large police contingent arrives minutes before the madrasa is sealed, June 2, 2026. Muslim residents watch silently from balconies. Photo: Pragya Singh.When asked if the madarsa management was in possession of the required documents, Mohd Ilyas, secretary of the madarsa, said, “We have the papers! “We were never asked for the documents before we were sealed – we are arriving now, having heard about this moments ago,” he said.“The documents are in the locker inside the madarsa,” said the naib secretary of the madarsa, Haji Rafique. “They are misusing their powers, that is what is happening. We were sitting in our houses, out of sight, and they were not even letting us do that. They are trying to scare us,” he said. The reason for their fear, he explains, is that the rabble-rousing, hate-speech-spewing crowds are not being sent away by the police.“Bhaiya samajh lo – agar hamarey kaghaz awaidh hain, toh saara khoda awaidh hai – if we dont have the right documents, nobody in Khoda has them,” said an agitated Haji Rafique, and when TV reporters repeatedly brought up Asad’s attack on Surya, he said, “Please don’t bring up one case to bring the entire Muslim community under a cloud. All we know about that is that the killing by Asad was wrong. Why are outsiders coming here and spoiling the atmosphere, abusing us? Why are they scaring us?”He claimed he was not allowed inside the madarsa even to pull out the documents from its locker. Not just that, for a while, 11 children were locked inside when the seal was placed on the madarsa doors. They were later allowed to leave.The madrasa was hurriedly sealed with around 11 young students trapped inside for some time before the teacher and helper intervened on their behalf with the police and administration, June 2, 2026. Photo: Pragya Singh.Moments after the madarsa had been sealed, Ghaziabad District Magistrate Ravindra Kumar Mandar told The Wire that there was no known connection, so far uncovered, between the attack on Surya and the madarsa: “No, look, after that [incident] the police launched Operation Clean Sweep here and under that all buildings, institutions and others are being reviewed in this area [Khoda]. We found three madarsas were not holding the required registrations and they have been sealed.”They said those accused in the case should include two Hindu friends of Surya’s, who were present during the stabbing – and are now being presented by the police as “witnesses”. The Wire asked Ghaziabad police commissioner J. Ravindra Gaud, who arrived with a large police contingent to oversee the sealing of the madrasa, about this allegation by locals. Is it that the two Hindu youngsters, captured by a CCTV camera during the attack on Surya, only later claimed to be mere witnesses in the episode? He responded, “All these things will come to light only after the investigation and in the charge sheet.”When asked if such a suspicion had arisen during the investigation so far, Gaud said, “We will get a fair investigation done – whoever will be found involved in [Surya’s killing] will face action. We will not see anybody’s religion.”Communitarian divide being sownAccording to Mohd Afzal, the counsellor, the biggest problem with how the situation in Khoda was evolving since May 28 was that residents were being asked to arrive at conclusions about a dispute whose cause was unknown. “Do people not realise when they make [improper] statements about what happened that they must live together here even after the dust settles?” he said, referring to rabble-rousing speeches of Hindutvawadis as well as off-hand remarks by some Muslim residents, which went ‘viral’, especially some that were taken out of context by media houses.He questions the state’s response to the events of May 28. “The police killed Asad in an encounter, but there should have been an inquiry first,” he says. “What was the dispute between the two? If that history had come to light, we would have known what really happened.”“Look at fate,” Afzal says, “Both friends died within a short while of each other,” referring to Surya’s stab wounds and Asad’s killing by police. “But now, both the people who knew why they fought are no longer alive,” he says. “If even one of them were here, we would at least have a chance to know what happened.”