On the morning of Eid-ul-Fitr, March 21, a Station House Officer in Uttar Pradesh’s Mainpuri district told a gathering of Muslim worshippers at a decades-old Eidgah in Kurawali that their prayers would be stopped. “Nahi hone dunga,” SHO Lalit Bhati declared in a video that subsequently went viral on social media. When Shakir Hussain, the Eidgah’s muttawali (caretaker), told the officer that namaz had always been performed there and asked to see the government order being invoked, Bhati responded that the prayers were being offered “awaidhanik roop se” (unlawfully) and that there was “saashan ka adesh” (a government order) to that effect. The order was never produced.What followed was a 20-minute standoff. Local Hindu residents came forward to tell the SHO that they had no objection to the prayers being offered. Community members intervened to prevent the situation from escalating further. Eventually, senior officials stepped in, and the namaz was offered inside the Eidgah. The controversy, however, did not end there.The official version that emerged later attempted to reframe the episode. SHO Bhati told the Indian Express that his objection was specifically to prayers being offered outside the Eidgah, at a chabutara (raised platform) belonging to one Gyan Singh, located roughly 300 metres away. He claimed the previous year’s prayers had been held at that spot, and that the police had advance information that the same might happen again. SDM Neeraj Dwivedi denied that any threats had been issued, calling the situation a “misunderstanding” and asserting that the worshippers had been informed a day in advance that namaz should be offered inside the Eidgah. This sanitised account, however, sits uncomfortably with the SHO’s own words captured on video. The opening salvo of “nahi hone dunga” carries no spatial qualifier about inside or outside; it is categorical. Reports from multiple news outlets, citing the viral video, also attribute to the SHO the words “mein yahi gaad dunga” (I will bury you here), a statement that, if established, would constitute criminal intimidation under Section 351 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023.The legal questions raised by the incident are straightforward. Article 25(1) of the Constitution guarantees to all persons the right freely to profess, practise, and propagate religion, subject to public order, morality, and health. It means the state can regulate religious practice where genuine public order concerns arise. It does not, however, mean that a police officer can unilaterally declare prayers “unlawful” and invoke an unspecified government order as the basis for stopping them. The rule of law demands that restrictions on fundamental rights be grounded in identifiable legal authority. When Hussain asked to see the order, he was doing precisely what a citizen in a constitutional democracy is entitled to do. The SHO’s inability to produce it is revealing.The administration’s fallback argument, that it was merely channelling prayers from an external location into the Eidgah, deserves scrutiny. An Eidgah, unlike a mosque, is by its very nature an open-air prayer ground. The word itself derives from the Arabic “Eid” and the Persian “gah” (place); it designates a large outdoor enclosure used specifically for the congregational prayers on Eid-ul-Fitr and Eid-ul-Adha. Where large numbers gather for Eid prayers, it is entirely common for the congregation to extend beyond the formal boundary of the Eidgah enclosure. Treating such overflow as inherently unlawful misconceives what an Eidgah is for.That said, the administration is correct that Article 25 permits regulation where prayers spill onto public roads or public property. The Allahabad High Court affirmed this principle in Maranatha Full Gospel Ministries v. State of U.P. (2026), decided on January 27, 2026. In that case, a Division Bench of Justices Atul Sreedharan and Siddharth Nandan held that no permission is required from the state to conduct religious worship within private premises, regardless of denomination. The court clarified, however, that if worship “has to spill over the public road or public property,” police intimation and, where required, permission must be sought. This is the principle the state would presumably rely on.The difficulty is that this principle cuts against the administration far more than it helps. The Eidgah in Kurawali is a designated prayer ground, the very “private premises” or “designated place of worship” that the High Court’s framework protects. The SHO was objecting to prayers at the Eidgah itself, whatever the post-hoc rationalisation. And even if the concern was genuinely about overflow to the chabutara 300 metres away, the proportionate response was to redirect those worshippers, not to arrive at the Eidgah and declare that prayers would be stopped altogether.The Allahabad High Court’s subsequent orders in the Sambhal case make this clearer still. In Munazir Khan v. State of U.P. (2026), the same Division Bench rejected the Sambhal district administration’s decision to cap the number of worshippers at a mosque to 20 during Ramzan. On February 27, 2026, the court held that the state’s duty is to ensure that every community can worship peacefully at designated places of worship or on private property without requiring permission. The bench directed, in terms that left little room for ambiguity, that if the Superintendent of Police and District Collector felt a law and order situation might arise, they should “either resign from their post or seek transfer outside Sambhal if they feel they are not competent enough to enforce the rule of law.”When the matter returned on March 16, five days before the Mainpuri incident, the court went further. It held that there shall be no restriction on the number of persons offering namaz at a premises where prayers have been traditionally conducted. It directed that the order be circulated to the Director General of Police and the Additional Chief Secretary (Home) for dissemination “right down to the lowest law enforcement authority in the State.” The Kurawali SHO, in other words, should have received this instruction before he turned up at the Eidgah on Eid morning.Two further legal points are relevant. First, the Supreme Court’s observation in Dr. M. Ismail Faruqui v. Union of India (1994) that a mosque is “not an essential part of the practice of religion of Islam” and that namaz can be offered “anywhere, even in open,” is frequently cited by state authorities to justify restricting prayer to designated indoor spaces. This is a misreading. In M. Siddiq v. Mahant Suresh Das (2019), the five-judge Constitution Bench in the Ayodhya title dispute held, by a majority, that the Faruqui observations were made in the specific context of land acquisition under the Ayodhya Act and were “neither relevant for deciding the suits nor relevant for deciding the appeals.” State authorities that rely on Faruqui to justify blanket restrictions on where Muslims may pray are relying on dicta that the Supreme Court itself has distanced from.Second, and perhaps most telling in the Kurawali context: the local Hindu community expressed no objection to the prayers. The “public order” exception in Article 25 presupposes an actual or genuinely apprehended threat to public order. When the very public in whose name order is being maintained tells the police that there is no problem, the constitutional justification for interference evaporates. The Mainpuri incident is one data point in a pattern that has been escalating across Uttar Pradesh. In Meerut, police in March 2025 announced that anyone found offering namaz on roads would face an FIR and a recommendation for passport cancellation. In Sambhal, the administration capped Ramzan worshippers at 20. In district after district, the administrative apparatus has treated Muslim congregational prayer as a presumptive law and order problem. The Allahabad High Court has pushed back, repeatedly and sharply, on constitutional grounds. The question is whether the executive will listen, or whether each Eid and each Ramzan will continue to produce fresh confrontations between police officers who cannot produce the orders they invoke and citizens who ask, simply, to be allowed to pray.