India’s religious clashes leave at least 40 dead as Hindu-first policies blamed for tensions
MUSLIMS IN India’s capital have returned for weekly prayers at fire-bombed mosques two days after a 72-hour clash between Hindus and Muslims that left at least 40 dead and hundreds injured.
Five days after they started, authorities have not said what sparked the riots – the worst communal violence in New Delhi in decades – hospitals were still trying to identify all the dead, and the toll continued to rise.
Tensions between Hindu hardliners and Muslims protesting against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s Hindufirst policies had been building for months when the violence exploded on Sunday night, on the eve of US President Donald Trump’s first state visit to India.
Kapil Mishra, a local leader of Mr 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 and swords, metal rods and axes.
There was a heavy police presence in they flashpoint areas last night. On one riot-torn street, Hindus shouted “Jai Shri Ram” or Long Live Ram, the Hindu god, as Muslims attempted to reach a mosque damaged in the riots.
The passage of a citizenship law in December that fast-tracks naturalisation for some religious minorities but not Muslims had already sparked massive protests across India that left 23 dead.
The protest violence is the latest in a long line of communal clashes that date to the British partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, when the country was split into secular, Hindu-majority India and Islamic Pakistan.
Clashes then claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, among all religions.