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 Hindu-first policies had been building for months when the violence hit on Sunday, on the eve of US President Donald Trump’s state visit.
Kapil Mishra, a local leader of 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, swords, metal rods and axes. There was a heavy police presence in the neighbourhood yesterday. 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 from neighbouring countries but not Muslims earlier spurred massive protests across India that left 23 dead.
The protest violence is the latest in a long line of clashes that date to the British partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, when the country was split into secular, Hindu-majority India and the Islamic state of Pakistan.
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