Aligarh, India — For Zakia Wali, Eid will never again be a joyous day. Instead, she says the Muslim festival will become a chilling reminder of the lynching of her brother, Mohammed Fareed, 30 years ago in the city she has called home ever since she was born.
“We couldn’t even give him ghusl (full ablution). That’s the state he was in,” Wali recalled in an interview with Al Jazeera from his Aligarh home. “No one bothered to count the injured. Eid now only means mourning.”
Fareed, who makes tandoori roti – flatbread baked in a huge clay oven – at a local eatery, was surrounded by a mob of Hindu hardliners on his way home the day after Eid.
A dozen men armed with wooden and iron clubs dragged 35-year-old Fareed through the street and beat him to death, in a horrific attack filmed by passersby on their mobile phone cameras.
Aligarh, a city of 1.2 million people, is in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, which is ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-majority Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose decade-long rule has seen a sharp rise in attacks against Muslims.
After the BJP surprisingly lost a majority of the country’s parliamentary seats in India’s sweeping general elections on June 4, opposition parties portrayed the results as a victory for the country’s traditions of democracy and secularism. Many analysts suggested that the results, and Modi’s reliance on his coalition partners in government, would force moderation among hardline Hindu groups that have long existed on the fringes of the BJP’s ideological leadership organization, the National Sovereignty Association, but have in recent years been embraced by the mainstream.
But three weeks later, India’s largest religious minority is grappling with a very different reality as a wave of anti-Muslim attacks unfold across the country, including in states ruled by the main opposition BJP party, the Indian National Congress.
A family’s home was destroyed after they were suspected of storing beef – meat from cows, an animal sacred to many Hindus – in their refrigerator. Three men were tortured and beaten to death on the highway. A hospital used to treat patients was destroyed.
The incident can only be told through the faith of the victim.
Ali Khan Mahmudabad, a political scientist and historian at Ashoka University in New Delhi, said the attacks only highlighted the foolishness of some of the analysis that has taken place in the wake of India’s election results.
“It would be a mistake to interpret the poll results as a victory for secularism,” Mahmudabad said, referring to the historically low number of Muslim lawmakers in recent elections.
Indeed, he said he expected “anti-Muslim violence” to increase across India as a means of “distraction” from the myriad challenges facing the country. Unemployment and inflation were among voters’ top concerns ahead of the recently concluded elections.
Protests…to protect the rioters
Mohammad Zaki, 30, said he heard neighbours banging on his door at home just after 10pm on June 18. “They showed me videos and photos of a seriously injured man,” he said. It was his older brother, Fareed, who had been attacked less than a kilometre away from their home.
If the people who came to tell him about the attack on his brother were neighbours, then the attackers were neighbours too, and Zaki is aware of this fact.
“It’s really scary that these people live in the same society,” he said. “They’re just thirsty for Muslim blood.”
Zaki said after asking locals, the family learned that passersby, fearing for Fareed’s life, had called the police, but Fareed died before reaching hospital.
Aligarh police investigating the lynching told Al Jazeera they have yet to determine what led to the killing but have arrested at least six people and charged them with murder. The accused claim Fareed was a thief, a charge denied by his family and friends.
“He was a very gentle person, he never said a bad word about anyone,” said Mustaq Ahmed, a childhood friend of Farid’s. “He never even scratched a nail that wasn’t his. [the accused] They are only lying because they committed a horrible crime.”
Soon after the arrests, the BJP, along with far-right groups, staged protests in defence of the six accused and demanded their release. The protests sealed off the city.
“If a Muslim man burgles into your house, would you offer him a wreath?” Shakuntala Bharti, an influential BJP leader and former mayor of Aligarh city, told Al Jazeera.
“If the police do not investigate properly, we know what to do. In Uttar Pradesh, [the] She also mentioned “bulldozer rule”, a reference to the practice of bulldozing Muslim homes in Uttar Pradesh and other BJP-ruled states, which Amnesty International has described as a “deliberate punishment of the Muslim community”.
But for Fareed’s sister, Wali, the questions about her brother’s alleged crimes are irrelevant. “Even if he was a thief, just slap him and hand him over to the police,” she says. “Why kill him like a barbarian?”
For now, she said, she has to focus on her 70-year-old mother, Zubaida, who is paralyzed and bedridden. “Fareed takes her to the bathroom, feeds her breakfast and looks after her medicines,” she said. [elderly] Women’s only source of support is gone.”
Wali said his mother’s blood pressure had spiked since Fareed’s body was brought to the house.
Wali added that unlike 10 years ago, when they used to celebrate festivals with their Hindu neighbours, that trust has been shattered beyond repair. “We now feel scared in Aligarh. We are scared of our neighbours.”
“Eid is our biggest festival but now Eid only reminds us of my brother’s sacrifice.”
‘Deafening silence’
About 400 kilometers (240 miles) away, a photo sparked mob riots on June 17.
Javed Qureshi had uploaded a photo on his WhatsApp status in which he posed with an animal carcass, after a mob stormed his shop in the town of Nahan in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh and accused them of slaughtering a cow.
In the presence of police, the crowd broke into the locked shop – Qureshi was from Uttar Pradesh and had returned home for Eid – and looted it, before attacking another shop run by Qureshi’s brother.
They warned other Muslim business owners to leave Nahan and called for a boycott.
Two days later, a police investigation determined that the animal in the photo was not a cow, but they still arrested Qureshi for “hurting religious sentiments” due to the “graphic” image he had used on WhatsApp.
Himachal Pradesh is ruled by the Indian National Congress, which claims to adhere to the principles of secularism enshrined in the Indian Constitution.
“The silence from opposition leaders over attacks on Muslims is deafening,” said Nadim Khan, national executive director of the Association for the Protection of Muslim Civil Rights (APCR), a human rights group.
Mahmudavar, the political scientist, said the BJP had “shifted the centre of Indian politics to the right”.
“So the opposition parties need to do the same and go along with ‘soft Hindutva,'” he said. Hindutva is the political ideology of the BJP and its Hindu-majority allies.
The silence of opposition leaders will make Muslims rethink their voting patterns, Khan said. “I have no complaints as I have no expectations from the BJP, but I had high expectations from those who claim high secular credentials.”
Khan referred to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s promise to build “shops of love in the marketplace of hate”.
Khan said Gandhi could not “use the M-word”. “The opposition parties are complicit in disenfranchising the Muslim community,” he said.
Gandhi’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, about 400 miles (640 km) away, in a village in BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh state, authorities destroyed the homes of 11 Muslim families suspected of storing beef in their refrigerators.
Al Jazeera reached out to two national spokesmen for the BJP about concerns about violence against Muslims, but they declined to comment.
Famous Mob
Even hospitals are no longer safe sanctuaries.
In the town of Medak in the southern state of Telangana, where Gandhi’s Indian National Congress party controls the state government, administrators at Minhaj-ul-Uloom, a religious school for Muslims, bought 40 bulls worth $30,000 for a mass sacrifice by more than 700 people at the Eid festival. They were wary: The Bharatiya Janata Party had doubled its number of seats in the state from four to eight, and school leaders worried that triumphalism over the ruling would translate into attacks on Muslims.
On June 15, while the cows were grazing in a field near the school, far-right vigilantes, ostensibly trying to stop the cows from being slaughtered, seized them. An altercation ensued. Police intervened, confiscated the cows and checked to see if they were cows. As they were not, the cows were later released.
Meanwhile, fighting broke out between the rioters and people from the school.
The two injured Muslims were rushed to the nearby Medak Orthopaedic Hospital, but the mob pursued them. Dr Surender Reddy was treating them at the hospital when he heard “a loud bang and sounds of stones being hurled from outside”.
The staff at Reddy Hospital were terrified and appealed to the relatives of the injured who were present inside the hospital not to react, but to no avail. The relatives of the injured Muslims went outside the hospital and tried to fight the mob, but the mob vandalised the hospital premises, including Reddy Hospital’s new car.
“We’ve never experienced anything like this, because at least the hospital was spared from mob attacks,” Reddy told Al Jazeera. “It was absolutely terrifying.” When staff reopened the hospital three days later, they found broken windows and medical equipment strewn across blood-stained floors. The hospital is now only open a few hours a day.
“Some staff have not returned since the incident,” he said. “They are scared.”
Since the hospital attack, some members of the mob have apologised to Reddy, he said. Meanwhile, Telangana police have arrested 36 people, including 13 BJP workers.
The attacks in Medak, Aligarh and Nahan states, ruled by both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress, represented a “reaction to the election results”, APCR’s Khan said.
“message [from Hindu majoritarian groups] We are united. “We remain omnipotent and will not cede any ground.”
Khan said Muslims were increasingly being relegated to second-class citizens in India. “Today, Muslim lives have no value,” he said. “Now in India, Muslims feel unsafe even in their own homes.”
