Muslim homes, shops bulldozed; over 150 arrested in Haryana
Al Jazeera :
Abdul Rasheed says police locked him in a bus as a bulldozer demolished his shops in India’s northern Haryana state where a Muslim-majority district saw communal clashes last week.
“I was heartbroken. My family and children depended on the rent we received from the shops.
We had rented shops to both Hindus and Muslims,” he told Al Jazeera on Sunday, adding that the authorities “gave no notice or showed any order, and bulldozed everything”.
“This is vengeance. They are destroying hotels, shops and homes. There is no appeal and hearing,” the 51-year-old said. “We have been handed a begging bowl.”
Rasheed’s is among more than 300 Muslim homes and businesses bulldozed by Haryana’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government since Thursday in yet another instance of collective – and selective – punishment of a community over religious violence.
The clashes began after a procession organised by a far-right Hindu group, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council or VHP) and its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, reached Haryana’s Nuh district, about 85km (52 miles) from New Delhi.
The two organisations, affiliated with the ruling BJP, often make headlines for their violent rallies targeting India’s religious minorities, mainly Muslims and Christians.
The Hindu groups blamed Muslims – who form nearly 77 percent of Nuh’s 280,000 residents, according to the last census conducted in 2011 – for starting the violence.
They said their procession was pelted with stones and their vehicles torched,
leading to clashes between the two communities.
Muslims say the trigger for the violence was a Facebook video released by Monu Manesar, a notorious Hindu vigilante accused of killing two Muslim men earlier this year for allegedly transporting cow meat.
Many Hindus belonging to the privileged castes consider cows holy. Sale and consumption of beef is banned in many Indian states, while dozens of lynchings of Muslim butchers and transporters have happened since India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014.
In the video, Manesar, who according to the Haryana police is absconding, purportedly urged Hindus to join him in Nuh for the VHP-Bajrang Dal procession – a call that angered the district’s Muslims.
As the news of clashes in Nuh spread, anti-Muslim violence erupted in different parts of Haryana.
In Gurugram, a bustling city on New Delhi’s outskirts whose glitzy highrises host several Fortune 500 companies, a young imam was beaten and stabbed to death by a mob and the mosque set ablaze.
Another mosque was attacked in Sohna, about 25km (15 miles) from Gurugram. Six people were killed in the violence last week – including a Muslim and Sikh police guard and two suspected Bajrang Dal members.
However, almost all the homes, shops – both concrete and moveable – and shanties bulldozed in the aftermath of the violence belong to Muslims.
“They are torturing Mewat. This is being done to make the Bajrang Dal happy,” Rasheed told Al Jazeera, using the historical name of Nuh.
In recent years, several states governed by the BJP have seen bulldozers being deployed to destroy the properties of Muslims accused of participating in religious clashes, or other such charges.
BJP spokesperson Raman Malik told Al Jazeera the demolitions were being carried out to stop “illegal encroachments” on public lands and had no connection with the riots.
When asked about the timing of the demolitions coinciding with the aftermath of the violence, he said, “Do you want this illegal work to be supported? Look at these two things separately.”
Several rights groups have condemned the Indian authorities for carrying out the demolitions, some of which were carried out miles away from the site of last week’s violence.
