For almost a month, Leicester, an English city northeast of Birmingham, has been the scene of violent clashes between individuals from the Hindu and Muslim communities. Since the victory, on August 28, in Dubai, of the Indian cricket team over that of Pakistan, these scuffles have reached an intensity ” unprecedented “according to the mayor of the city, on Saturday September 17 and Sunday September 18, leading to the arrest of eighteen people, according to the British daily The Guardian.
Police said Monday they had arrested a total of forty-seven people since the start of violence in this city where Hindus and Muslims have lived together peacefully for half a century. The violence made headlines in India and Pakistan, but was partly overshadowed in the United Kingdom by the national mourning that followed the death of Elizabeth II.
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Escalation of community antagonisms
At the end of August, the national teams of India and Pakistan met in Dubai as part of the Asian Cricket Cup. After the Indian victory, celebrations in the eastern city of Leicester escalated, leading to violence. Rumors on social networks then report the attack of a Muslim, supporter of the Pakistan team, by Hindus. A local police spokesman later claimed that the victim was in fact Sikh and a fan of the same team as his attackers, that of India. But the fire has already caught on in the communities, which accuse each other of racism and persecution.
These clashes were particularly violent on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. In the afternoon, a group of Hindu men were seen walking up Green Lane Road, an avenue just over a mile in east Leicester near a Hindu temple, and lined many businesses owned by Muslims. The undeclared protest was advancing, according to footage seen by the Guardianto the sound of traditional singing Jai Shri Ram (“Glory to Lord Rama”). An informal salute or a sign of adherence to the Hindu faith in India, the song has recently been taken up by Hindu organizations with nationalist tendencies, some perpetrating violence against Indians of the Muslim faith.
Galvanized by these videos shared on social networks, members of the Muslim community of Leicester have in turn gathered without authorization. “The police cannot be trusted, we have to defend our community ourselves”justified some participants, quoted by a witness to the events at Guardian. Many images show a crowd of people that police are trying to contain, blocking the streets physically, shoulder to shoulder.
A representative of Leicester Hindu Temples, Dharmesh Lakhani, has confirmed that a flag hanging at the Shivalaya Temple building in Belgrave Road has been removed while another was burned by protesters. Mr. Lakhani denounced practices “unacceptable”while the organization managing the temple said “shocked and saddened to have witnessed such behavior” in Leicester.
The nationalist policy of the Indian Prime Minister in question
“Normality in Leicester is very good relations between people of different faiths”, City mayor Peter Soulsby told the BBC. Asked by the Guardian, Gurharpal Singh, emeritus professor of Sikh and Punjab studies at SOAS University of London and visiting scholar at the University of Leicester, confirms that the city is a model of multiculturalism. However, in addition to recent social tensions resulting in particular from the Covid-19 pandemic, Indian politics and its “increasing influence [avec] mobilization by the BJP [le Bharatiya Janata Party ou Parti du peuple indien, de Modi] of the Diaspora” changed the balances of Leicester.
“Underlying socio-economic tensions exist, but they are exacerbated by small groups with a communal discourse”, explains the professor emeritus to the British newspaper. The polarization between the Hindu and Muslim communities has greatly increased under the mandate of Narendra Modi, Indian Prime Minister whose government is regularly accused of ill-treatment of minorities, mainly the Muslim community.
Mr. Modi, head of government since 2014, leads under the banner of the BJP, considered the political branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a group of Hindu ultranationalist volunteers of which Narandra Modi was a young member. The organization was established in 1925 to implement thehindutva (“Hinduity” or “Indianness”), by which certain aspects of religion are used for political ends, in particular to make India, secular since 1950, a Hindu state.
Since 2014, the BJP and Mr. Modi have succeeded in mobilizing the Indian diaspora, notably in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Although expatriates do not have the right to vote, they are believed to have close ties with the communities that remained in India.
Local elected officials denounce “a national problem” and fear political recovery
While the clashes have gone far beyond the sporting framework, local politicians fear that the conflict will go beyond the city’s borders. “If we fail to get to the root of the problem, it will spread beyond Leicester; the government must intervenenotably alerted an MP for Leicester East, Claudia Webbe.
Monday, the Guardian learned from local police that nearly half of the eighteen people arrested over the weekend of September 17-18 were from outside the county. For Mayor Mr. Soulsby, this is the first proof that individuals are going to Leicester on purpose to participate in the scuffles. “It suggests that people who have other battles to fight are coming to Leicester to fight them. It’s painful that they choose to do this in our city. We demand peaceful relations between our communities. »
Mr. Soulsby, as Mr.me Webbe, points to the responsibility of social networks in the escalation of violence. “I have seen a large sample of what is circulating on social networks: it is very very very distorted and some posts completely lie about what is currently happening between the communities” of Leicester, the mayor told the Guardian. And to claim that “Social networks prevent the situation from getting worse”.
Mme Webbe, who was elected as a Labor MP but was kicked out after accusations of harassment, called on police to coordinate a nationwide response and on companies that run social media to intervene.
The local elected official also called for a fight against the far-right ideologies that take hold of this sequence of violence. In France, some members of Reconquête, the movement created by Eric Zemmour, comment on these clashes on Twitter, claiming that they have their origin in the “great replacement”exhuming as evidence old press articles naming Leicester as the city “most ethnically diverse” of the region.
On Tuesday morning, leaders of the Hindu and Muslim communities gathered outside a mosque in the city to send a message of appeasement. Calling for an immediate halt to “provocation and violence”they condemned, according to a video published by the local newspaper Leicester Mercury, of the “physical attacks on innocent people”who “are not part of our beliefs”.