- Al-Najjar University is overflowing due to the increased influx of Muslims.
- A professor at the London School of Economics blames rising Islamophobia on apartheid.
- Experts point out A significant increase in hate speech against Muslims.
NEW DELHI: Muslims living in India’s capital, New Delhi, are congregating in pockets far from the country’s Hindu majority, seeking safety in large numbers in the wake of deadly 2020 riots and a rise in anti-Muslim hate speech.
Nasreen and her husband Tawfiq are one of the couple who were staying in Shiv Vihar, an upcoming neighborhood in northeastern New Delhi. However, riots in February 2020 saw Muslims targeted as Tawfiq – according to a police report he filed days after being hospitalized – was pushed by a crowd. Of people from the second floor of the building in which they live.
He survived, but had a permanent limp and was only able to return to work selling clothes on the street after spending nearly three years recovering.
Shortly after the riots, the couple moved to Loni, a remote area with poor infrastructure and fewer job opportunities, but a large Muslim population.
“I will not return to that area,” said Tawfiq, who like his wife has one name. “I feel safer among Muslims.” Reuters.
The news agency conducted interviews with about twenty people who highlighted the concentration of the Muslim population away from the Hindus.
Details about the phenomenon, which has led to a major Muslim neighborhood in Delhi running out of space, have not previously been reported.
There is no official data on apartheid in India, whose long-delayed census means there are few reliable figures on how much Muslim enclaves have grown in the past decade. Muslims constitute about 14% of India’s population of 1.4 billion people.
Delhi’s Ground Zero area is the central neighborhood of Jamia Nagar, which has long been a temporary refuge for Muslims when communal riots break out.
As more Muslims influxed, the neighborhood became overcrowded, despite a construction boom, according to 10 local leaders, including politicians, activists and clerics, as well as five real estate agents.
“No matter how brave a Muslim is, he feels he has to act because if a mob comes, how brave are you really?” Raees Khan, a real estate agent in south Delhi, said Muslim clients are now almost exclusively requesting homes in Muslim-majority areas like Jamia Nagar.
National racial segregation has increased significantly in the past decade, said Raphael Suswind, a political anthropologist at the London School of Economics, who has supervised long-term fieldwork on India’s Muslim population.
He added that the rise of Islamophobia under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which came to power in 2014, is the “main driver” of the trend.
Six Muslim community leaders said significant anecdotal evidence supports Susewind’s assertion that segregation has increased.
Nagar University cleric MD Sahil said the number attending early morning prayers at his mosque had doubled to more than 450 people in the past four to five years, and this reflected the overall rise in the population there.
In response to Reuters’ questions, Jamal Siddiqui, a senior BJP official for minority affairs, noted that poor Muslims may choose to live in segregated areas because such neighborhoods tend to be affordable. “Educated Muslims are leaving the region and settling in developed areas with mixed populations,” he said.
However, Syed Syed Hassan, a Congress member in Jamia Nagar, said the big push factor for Delhi’s communal closure was the 2020 riots.
More than 200 people were injured and at least 53 people, most of them Muslims, were killed in protests after Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu nationalist government moved to pass a law that would make it easier for many non-Muslims to become citizens.
A 2020 Delhi government report blamed the riots on BJP leaders who made speeches calling for violence against protesters. At the time, the party said the allegations were baseless, and law enforcement authorities said there was no evidence that one of the leaders blamed in the report was responsible.
The Delhi government, controlled by the opposition Aam Aadmi Party, did not respond to requests for comment.
Hate speech is on the rise
India’s National Crime Records Bureau, a government agency that collects and analyzes crime data, does not keep records of targeted violence against communities.
It said the average number of annual riots of communal origins fell by about 9% between 2014 and 2022 compared to the previous nine years when the Congress Party ran India.
But independent experts at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, a Washington-based think tank, documented a significant increase in anti-Muslim hate speech, from 255 incidents in the first half of 2023 to 413 incidents in the second half of 2023. The research institution said that politicians from the… The Bharatiya Janata Party and its affiliates have been instrumental in this direction.
Reuters had previously reported on how right-wing “cow vigilantes”, some of whom have ties to the Bharatiya Janata Party, led mobs against Muslims.
Prime Minister Modi, while campaigning in April for a third term as prime minister, attacked Muslims as “infiltrators” who had “more children,” implicitly suggesting they posed a threat to India’s Hindu majority.
BJP’s Siddiqui added that the Prime Minister was referring to illegal immigrants such as Rohingya Muslims who he claimed were “living in India and also weakening India”.
When previously asked about alleged anti-Muslim bias, the BJP government said it did not discriminate, and that many of its anti-poverty programs benefited Muslims, who are among the poorest groups in India.
The BJP was only able to form a fragile coalition government after the results of the national elections were announced in June. In the immediate aftermath, at least eight incidents of anti-Muslim executions were reported, the NGO Association for the Protection of Civil Rights reported on July 5.
Safety in numbers
Jamia Nagar is a cluster of busy alleys behind Jamia Millia Islamia, an Islamic university that was the epicenter of the 2020 protests. It is located in an area of southeast Delhi that is home to several Muslim neighborhoods and has a population of about 150,000, according to state election data.
When Reuters visited the Strip’s narrow alleys on a sweltering summer day, they were surrounded by five-story buildings. Two real estate agents said developers have added three storeys to several two-storey buildings to meet the increase in demand. In a sign of the booming growth, dozens of newly built kindergartens have also been established in the narrow lanes of the area.
Most Muslim enclaves are not well developed. A 2023 study by British, American and Indian economists, which analyzed 1.5 million Indian areas, found that public services such as water and schools were relatively scarce in Muslim neighborhoods and that children in such areas often faced educational deprivation.
After Tawfiq and Nisreen moved to Loni after Tawfiq’s assault, their income was cut in half, and Tawfiq was only able to work reduced hours.
Nasreen’s daughter, Muskaan, 16, suffered. Muskaan said the school on the outskirts of Delhi was under-resourced, and she missed her classmates. After feeling that the new school was not for her, she dropped out.
But Nisreen does not regret this step. “I will never come back. I have lost trust in them,” she said, referring to neighbors who she said were part of the mob that pushed her husband.
Reuters was unable to independently verify her claim, but Sam Sundar, a 44-year-old Hindu who lives in Nasreen’s old neighborhood, said Hindus and Muslims suffered during the riots, which he blamed on outside perpetrators.
But he acknowledged that Muslims bear the brunt: “There are now very few Muslims living in the area. This is not a good thing.”
Nasreen’s neighbour, Malika, also moved to the suburbs after her husband was killed in the 2020 riots. But she was unable to find a job, and now also lives part-time in a small room in another neighborhood with a larger Hindu population, where she is close to construction sites. Where you do strange things.
Malika said: “Here I suffer from poverty, and there I feel insecure.”
The enclaves also attracted upper-middle-class Muslim families, who lived more comfortably in mixed areas, said Rees, the real estate agent.
“People feel it is better to live in separate areas rather than being exposed to constant threat to life and property from other community members,” said Mujahid Nafees, a Muslim leader from Modi’s home state of Gujarat, which hosts India’s largest Muslim enclave. About 400,000.