From India to Britain: This Is How Hindus Transferred Their Hostility to Muslims

Violent clashes erupted between Muslims and Hindus in East Leicester in recent weeks, following an India-Pakistan Asia Cup cricket match at the end of last month.

The fights, which spilled over into serious chaos in the following weeks, included chanting anti-Muslim slogans in front of mosques, smashing cars, and direct clashes, despite attempts by the police to control the mobs.

Amid widespread condemnation on social media, many link the tension rocking the relationship between Muslims and Hindus in the British city with the ongoing hate speech against Muslims in India since the right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office.

This time, the Hindus are attacking Muslims outside India, and their hostility is likely to throw its shadows on other British cities.

 

'No Longer Worry Just in India'

Leicester is one of the great melting pots of Britain, where people speak more than 70 languages, and is believed to be the first city in Britain where the white population became a minority.

The relations between the various components of the society have been good over the years. This is why many wonder what has been happening in Leicester's streets in recent weeks.

The city has witnessed increasing tensions between Muslim and Hindu communities, reflecting fears of spilling riots over into other cities.

The hatred and racism of Hindu extremists towards Muslims exceeded India's borders, this time reaching the UK.

A group of Hindus attacked Muslims, chanting anti-Muslim slogans in front of their homes and in front of the mosque in the city, as well.

The incidents of Hindu attacks on Muslims were documented by activists on Twitter with videos explaining that tensions began to spark in the 2022 Asian Cup in Dubai on August 23, 2022, when India won a match against Pakistan.

The match was followed by confrontations between Hindus and Pakistanis in Leicester on September 17, 2022. The clashes popped up again, after an unplanned demonstration, according to the police, while activists confirmed that Hindus deliberately organized the demonstration while Muslims were performing prayers.

Many activists on social media, especially on Twitter, said that these recent violent attacks against the Muslim community should serve as "a wake-up call," where Hindu nationalism "is no longer a worry just in India."

 

Conspiracy Theories

The hostility of Hindutva activists in Britain was documented by what was being published in the major media and newspapers.

The Independent, for example, deleted an article by a Hindu woman in which she described the intolerance she noticed against Muslims among her sect after the writer of the article received some threats.

It is worth noting that activists and defenders of freedom of expression have been silent about this intimidation when it comes to revealing Muslims' suffering.

Some Hindutva conspiracy theories have also found their way into British news sites, including the silly "Flood Jihad" claim, where Muslims are accused of causing the devastating floods in the northeastern state of Assam in India. Britain's major media outlets have also paid attention to the "Love jihad" conspiracy theory, which claims that Muslim men seek to convert Hindu women through marriage.

Although the media coverage of the events in Leicester was brief, it revealed another disturbing trend in coverage of Hindu violence against Muslims, which is the diagnosis of massacres and violence, as a conflict between two equal sides, to the extent that when one reads what these coverages describe, along with reports published by the anti-Muslim media, he can't help but wonder: Are Muslims allowed to be victims?

The analysis of the content of media coverage in Britain and around the world indicates that the answer to the question is: "no, they are not allowed to." The Media Monitoring Center has revealed a frequent omission of the fact that Muslims are the targets, as is the case with the coverage of Leicester's recent events.

Due to the incomplete description of the facts of what is happening, the following question will be: Who are the perpetrators, and who are the victims?

During the February 2020 attacks on Muslim protesters in Delhi, independent journalists documented Hindutva gangs receiving help from Indian police who either actively participated in the attacks or did nothing to prevent them, the center found.

Dozens of articles considered the events a "riot," while only a very few articles provided an accurate description of the nature and context of the attacks.

Another example is the use of the phrase "religious tensions" to describe a gang of Hindus throwing stones and blocking highways after rumors spread that Muslims were slaughtering cows for their meat.

In the context of the Hindutva attacks on Muslims in India, terms such as "clashes," "riots," and "communal violence" are used.

Despite media efforts to characterize this issue as a conflict between two equal sides, it has become clear who is inciting whom.

Exclusion and Oppression

When considering what is happening in Leicester as riots over a cricket match involving "Islamist mobs intimidating and harassing the local Hindu community." This is not just factually inaccurate but incredibly racist and grave.

In fact, such conclusions completely ignore "the role that Hindutva ethnonationalism has played in the situation and the British government's tolerance and indeed support of this movement," according to The New Arab newspaper.

It is also important to mention Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's hostility towards Muslims, especially after giving orders to the police not to harm Hindus during the Gujarat massacres in February 2002.

After coming to power, "Modi unleashed the Hindu extremists to persecute and restrict Muslims in various ways, and this was evident in the killing of hundreds of Muslims on charges of eating or slaughtering beef, and assaulting others on charges of converting Hindus to Islam, or tempting Hindu women to marry Muslims, and opposing the veil Muslim students, banning the sale of halal meat, removing the Islamic names of cities, villages, and streets, and placing Hindu names instead," the same source read.

Changing schoolbooks was also among the measures to uproot Muslim history; any material that praises Muslims was removed.

Still worse, there was an amendment of the Nationality Law to deprive millions of Muslims of enjoying Indian citizenship, in addition to calls for the extermination of Muslims in India, "demolishing their homes and shops and storming their neighborhoods."

While adopting a sequential approach to tightening the grip on economic measures for Muslims, the Indian authorities do not allow them, also, to develop and improve their situation by excluding them from all high positions in the state, whether in the military, security, or judicial institutions, as well as other institutions of legislation and implementation.

For instance, by the end of 2010, there were no more than 36 Muslim deputies in the Parliament, which included at that time 543 deputies.

In efforts to "purify" the Parliament of Muslims, the number of Muslims in the Parliament is expected to fall to the lowest level in the history of India due to the dominance of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its opposition to the candidacy of Muslims. In Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state with a population of 43 million Muslims, not a single Muslim candidate was elected to the Indian Parliament.