“Eid means mourning”: Muslims lynched in India after shock election result

Aligarh, India — For Zakia Wali, Eid will never be happy again. Instead, she says, the Muslim holiday will serve as a horrific reminder of how her older brother, Mohammad Fareed, was lynched in the town where they have lived since they were born there 30 years ago.

“We couldn’t give him a ghusl (complete ablution), that was the situation,” recalled Wali, speaking to Al Jazeera from his home in Aligarh. “No one dared to count the wounded. Eid will now only mean mourning.

Fareed, who prepared tandoori rotis – flatbreads cooked in giant clay ovens – at local restaurants, was returning home one day after Eid when he was surrounded by a crowd of Hindu hardliners.

More than a dozen men, armed with wooden sticks and iron bars, dragged Fareed, 35, into the street and beat him to death while bystanders captured the horror on their cellphone cameras. telephones.

Aligarh, a city of 1.2 million people, is in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-majority Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), under which attacks against Muslims have exploded for ten years.

On June 4, after the BJP lost its national majority following the stunning results of India’s mammoth national election, opposition parties presented the result as a victory for the country’s democratic and secular traditions. Many analysts have suggested that the results, and Modi’s reliance on coalition partners in government, would force moderation among extremist Hindu groups that have long dwelt on the fringes of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – the ideological mentor organization of the BJP – but have gained some mainstream acceptance in recent years. .

Three weeks later, a series of anti-Muslim attacks in different parts of the country – including in states ruled by Congress, the main opposition party – has left India’s largest religious minority struggling. a very different reality.

Families’ homes were razed on suspicion that they were keeping beef – the meat of cows, a sacred animal for many Hindus – in their refrigerators. Three men were beaten to death after being tortured on a highway. A hospital treating patients was vandalized.

The incidents are only reported on the faith of the victims.

These attacks, said Ali Khan Mahmudabad, a political scientist and historian at Ashoka University in New Delhi, only highlight the folly of some of the analysis that followed India’s election results.

“It would be a mistake to consider the poll results as a victory for secularism,” Mahmudabad said, referring to the historically low number of Muslims elected to Parliament in recent elections.

In fact, he said he expects “the violence of anti-Muslim sentiments” to increase across India as a way to “divert attention” from the myriad challenges facing the country – the Unemployment and inflation were voters’ main concerns ahead of the just-concluded election. .

A demonstration… to defend the crowd

Mohammad Zaki, 30, was at home when he heard a crowd of neighbors knocking on his door shortly after 10 p.m. on June 18. “They showed me video and photos of a seriously injured man,” he said. It was Fareed, his older brother, who had been attacked less than a kilometer from their home.

If the people who came to alert him of the attack on his brother were neighbors, so were the attackers themselves – a fact that does not escape Zaki.

“I am so afraid that these kinds of people live among us in the same society,” he said. “They were simply thirsty for Muslim blood. »

Zaki said that upon inquiring with locals, the family learned that a passerby had called the police fearing for Fareed’s life. But Fareed died before reaching the hospital.

Aligarh police officials investigating the lynching told Al Jazeera they were yet to identify what led to the killing, although they have so far arrested at least six people and charged with murder. The accused claims that Fareed was a thief, which his family and friends have denied.

“He was a very calm man, who never spoke ill of anyone,” said Mushtaq Ahmed, a childhood friend of Fareed. “He never even pulled out a nail that didn’t belong to him. They (the accused) are simply lying because they committed a horrible crime.

Soon after the arrests, the BJP, along with far-right groups, staged a protest to defend the six accused and demand their release. The city was closed because of the demonstration.

“If a Muslim comes in to rob your house, will you garland him? » Shakuntala Bharti, an influential BJP leader and former mayor of Aligarh, told Al Jazeera.

“If the police don’t investigate it properly, we know how to deal with it. Bulldozing is the rule in Uttar Pradesh,” she added, referring to a tactic used in Uttar Pradesh and other BJP-ruled states in which Muslim homes are razed to the ground. by bulldozer. Amnesty International called the use of bulldozers to demolish Muslim homes without any legal mandate “deliberate punishment against the Muslim community.”

But for Fareed’s younger sister Wali, questions about her brother’s alleged crime don’t matter. “Even if it was a thief, slap him and hand him over to the police,” she said. “Why kill my brother like savages?”

For now, she says, she must focus on her mother Zubaida, 70, who is bedridden and suffering from paralysis. “Fareed would take her to the bathroom, give her breakfast and take care of her medication,” she said. “The (elderly) wife’s only support is gone.”

Since Fareed’s lifeless body was brought home, his mother’s blood pressure has skyrocketed, Wali said.

Unlike a decade ago, Wali celebrated festivals with his Hindu neighbors, she said, adding that this trust had been irreparably broken. “We now feel terror in Aligarh, we are afraid of our own neighbors. »

“Eid is our biggest holiday, but now Eid will only remind me of my brother’s sacrifice.”

‘Deafening silence’

Nearly 400 km away, a photograph triggered collective violence on June 17.

After Javed Qureshi uploaded a photo posing with an animal carcass as his WhatsApp status, a mob in the town of Nahan in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh stormed his store, accusing him of having slaughtered a cow.

In the presence of police, the mob stormed into the locked shop (Qureshi lives in Uttar Pradesh state and had returned home for Eid) and looted it. The mob then attacked another shop owned by Qureshi’s brother.

They warned other Muslim entrepreneurs to leave Nahan and called for their boycott.

Two days later, a police investigation revealed that the animal depicted in the photograph was not a cow. However, police arrested Qureshi for “hurting religious sentiments”, citing the “graphic” image he had used on WhatsApp.

The state of Himachal Pradesh is governed by the Congress party, which claims to respect the secular principles enshrined in the Indian Constitution.

“The silence from opposition leaders on attacks on Muslims is deafening,” said Nadeem Khan, national secretary of the Association for the Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), an advocacy group.

Mahmudabad, the political scientist, said the BJP had “pulled the center of Indian politics to the right.”

“So the opposition must do the same and align with soft Hindutva,” he said. Hindutva is the political ideology of the BJP and its majority Hindu allies.

The silence of opposition leaders will prompt Muslims to rethink their voting patterns, Khan said. “There are no complaints about the BJP because there are no expectations from them, but we had high hopes from people claiming high secular qualifications. »

Khan referred to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s promise to build “a store of love in a market of hate”.

Gandhi, Khan said, cannot bring himself to “use the M-word.” “The opposition is complicit in the disenfranchisement of the Muslim community,” he said.

Gandhi’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, in a village in the BJP-ruled state of Madhya Pradesh, about 640 km (400 miles) away, authorities demolished the homes of 11 Muslim families suspected of storing beef in refrigerators .

Al Jazeera contacted two national BJP spokespersons for a response to concerns about anti-Muslim violence, but they declined to comment.

A known crowd

Even hospitals are no longer sanctuaries of safety.

In the town of Medak in the southern state of Telangana, where Gandhi’s Congress controls the state government, administrators of Minhaj Ul Uloom, a religious school for Muslims, purchased 40 bullocks worth 30 000 dollars for the collective sacrifice of more than 700 people on the occasion of Eid. They were wary: The BJP had doubled its number of parliamentary seats in the state from four to eight, and school leaders feared that triumphalism over the verdict would turn into aggression against Muslims.

As the cattle grazed in a field near the school, a far-right militia team ostensibly trying to prevent the cows from being slaughtered grabbed the oxen on June 15. Arguments followed. The police intervened and took the time to determine if they were cows. This was not the case and the cattle were subsequently released.

Meanwhile, fighting broke out between the crowd and those present at the school.

Two injured Muslims were taken to the nearby Medak Orthopedic Hospital, but the crowd followed them. Dr Surender Reddy was treating them at the hospital when he heard “loud noises and stone pelting outside”.

Terrified, Reddy’s staff called on relatives of the injured inside the hospital not to react. But it was in vain. Relatives of the injured Muslims came out and tried to fight the mob, who vandalized the hospital premises, including Reddy’s new car.

“I have never experienced anything like this because at least the hospitals are spared from the crowds,” Reddy told Al Jazeera. “It was just absolutely horrible.” Broken windows and medical equipment littered the blood-stained floor when staff reopened the hospital three days later. The hospital now only remains open a few hours a day.

“Some staff members have not yet returned since the incident,” he said. “They are terrified.”

Since the hospital attack, some members of the crowd have apologized to Reddy, he said. Meanwhile, Telangana police arrested 36 people, including 13 BJP members.

The attacks in Medak, Aligarh and Nahan – in states governed by both the BJP and the Congress – represent “a reaction to the election result”, said APCR’s Khan.

“The message (from Hindu majority groups) is unified: ‘We are still all-powerful and will not give up any space’.”

Khan said Muslims were increasingly being pushed into second-class citizenship in India. “The life of a Muslim has no value today,” he said. “As a Muslim in India, you no longer feel safe even inside your home.”