By Reuters
NEW DELHI —
In February 2020, Nasreen and her husband, Tofik, were living in Shiv Vihar, an upcoming neighborhood in northeast New Delhi. But that month, riots erupted targeting Muslims like them, and Tofik was pushed by a mob from the second floor of the building where they lived, according to a police report he filed days later from hospital.
He survived but has a permanent limp and was only able to return to work selling clothes on the street after spending nearly three years recuperating.
Soon after the riots the couple moved to Loni, a more remote area with poorer infrastructure and job prospects — but with a sizable Muslim population.
“I will not go back to that area. I feel safer among Muslims,” Tofik, who like his wife goes by one name, told Reuters.
Reuters interviewed about two dozen people, who described how Muslims in the Indian capital have been congregating in enclaves away from the nation’s Hindu majority, seeking safety in numbers following the deadly 2020 riot and an increase in anti-Muslim hate speech.
There is no official data on segregation in India, whose long-delayed census also means that there are few reliable figures on how much Muslim enclaves have grown in the past decade. Muslims comprise about 14% of India’s 1.4 billion people.
This story was originally published in voanews.com. Read the full story here.