Areeb Ullah / Middle East Eye
It’s late afternoon, and silence has replaced the hustle and bustle in the restaurants and clothes shops on Leicester’s celebrated Golden Mile along Belgrave Road.
Premises that would typically be full of customers riffling through saris and buying Indian desserts are now nearly empty, with old Diwali signs and portraits of the late Queen Elizabeth II fading on shop windows. Outside, roads normally congested with traffic are almost deserted.
It has been two days since groups of masked Hindu men, some armed with metal poles, marched through parts of the Golden Mile chanting “Jai Shri Ram”, a chant appropriated by Hindu nationalists in India and frequently used to intimidate the country’s minority Muslim population.
“I have lived here all my life, and never imagined something like this happening in Leicester,” said Zubair Alli, who witnessed the violence on Saturday. “We grew up with Hindus. They’re our brothers. This madness doesn’t make sense.”
Often viewed as a benchmark for multiculturalism in Britain, Leicester is home to the UK’s largest Indian population, who are both Hindu and Muslim, outside of London.
Spanning several generations, many of Leicester’s Indian population have family roots in the state of Gujarat and came to the UK via Kenya, Malawi and Uganda.
Many are descended from Indians who went to East Africa as traders and indentured labourers under British imperial rule, before emigrating to the UK. Thousands of Indians arrived in Leicester – once home to a thriving textiles industry – in the 1970s, after Ugandan President Idi Amin gave them 90 days to leave the country.
But Leicester has not been immune to the growing influence in India of Hindutva, an ideology that calls for the creation of a Hindu Rashtra, or pure Indian nation comprised only of Hindus, by marginalising the country’s minority groups, including India’s Christian, Dalit and Muslim communities.
Over the past few months, tensions have been simmering between the different communities after several incidents saw groups of men identifying as Hindus beating up Muslim men.
One incident in May 2022 saw a Muslim man beaten up and later hospitalised after a group of about 30 men broke his arm and bruised parts of his back, after he was asked, “Are you Muslim?”
Anti-social behaviour outside mosques, public urination, fly-tipping and playing loud music in the early hours of the morning have also created concern within Leicester’s Asian community. Disinformation, disseminated mainly via WhatsApp, including fake stories of Hindu youths kidnapping a Muslim woman and mosques being attacked, compounded the situation.
Tensions came to the fore in August 2022, when Indian cricket fans walked through Leicester city centre screaming “Death to Pakistan”, a chant viewed by some as a direct reference to Muslims, irrespective of whether they are from India or Pakistan.
This story was originally published in middleeasteye.net . Read the full story here