Uneasy calm after violence
Muslims in a northeastern neighbourhood of India’s capital have returned to firebombed mosques for weekly prayers, after a 72-hour clash between Hindus and Muslims that left at least 40 dead and hundreds injured.
Five days after the riots started, authorities have not said what sparked the worst communal violence in New Delhi in decades.
Hospitals were yesterday still trying to identify the dead as the toll continued to rise, and residents of the areas affected by the riots were still seeking loved ones.
‘‘If they burn our mosques, we will rebuild them again and pray. It’s our religious right, and nobody can stop us from practicing our religion,’’ said Mohammad Sulaiman, who was among about 180 men who prayed on the rooftop of a mosque that was set on fire during the unrest.
Tensions between Hindu hardliners and Muslims protesting the Hindu nationalist policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had been building for months when the violence exploded on Monday, the eve of US President Donald Trump’s first state visit to India.
Kapil Mishra, a local leader of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party who lost his Delhi state assembly seat in recent elections, demanded at a rally that police shut down a Muslim-led protest in the city or else he and his followers would do it themselves. Hindus and Muslims attacked each other with guns, swords, metal rods and axes.
Religious tensions in the area still simmered yesterday, tempered by a heavy police presence. On one riot-torn street, Hindus shouted ‘‘Jai shri Ram’’ or ‘‘Long live Ram’’, a Hindu god, as Muslims attempted to reach a mosque damaged in the riots. Several Muslim residents said most Muslim families had locked their homes and fled the area.
The passage of a citizenship law in December that fast-tracks naturalisation for some religious minorities from neighbouring countries but not Muslims earlier spurred massive protests across India that left 23 people dead.
This week’s death toll marked the worst religiously motivated violence in New Delhi since 1984, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards, triggering a wave of riots that resulted in the deaths of more than 3000 Sikhs in the capital and more than 8000 nationwide.
In 1992, tens of thousands of Hindu extremists razed a 16thcentury mosque in northern India, claiming that it stood on Ram’s birthplace. Nearly 2000 people were killed across the country in the riots that followed. The religious polarisation that followed saw Modi’s right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party emerge as the single largest party in India’s parliament.
In 2002, the western state of Gujarat erupted in violence after a train filled with Hindu pilgrims was attacked by a Muslim mob and 60 Hindus burned to death. In retaliation, more than 1000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the state.
Modi was Gujarat’s chief minister at the time. He was accused of tacit support for the rampage against Muslims, but a court ultimately cleared him of wrongdoing.
Violent large-scale clashes between Hindus and Muslims last took place in New Delhi in 2014, several months after Modi’s party came to power, in a largely poor neighbourhood close to where this week’s rioting occurred. That violence left three dozen people injured.
A government spokesman denied that Modi’s government had inflamed religious tensions and failed to protect Muslims.
Several thousand Muslims marched from the main mosque in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka yesterday to denounce India’s government for allegedly inflaming tensions between Hindus and Muslims, leading to the deadly clashes.