‘Hindus have changed’: A sleepy Indian state becomes anti-Muslim tinderbox

Kadamtala (Tripura), India – The last thing that Shahin Ahmed, 38, remembers of his brother, Alfeshani Ahmed, was a frantic call with him amid gunshots and screams.

At about 9pm on October 6, Alfeshani, a 36-year-old owner of a smartphone and electronic accessories shop, had just hastily shut his shop in the Kadamtala market to rush back home to Jher Jheri, a Muslim-majority village over three kilometres (about 2 miles) away in North Tripura, a district in northeast India.

A mob was running riot in the market, and Ahmed knew his shop wouldn’t be spared. He then left the store, leaving only the store’s account ledger, which contained all of his financial transactions and records, Ahmed said.

Prior to the start of the day, a Muslim driver in the area had protested a local Hindu club’s subscription for Durga Puja, a significant Hindu festival. The driver and a passenger, both Muslims, were also allegedly assaulted by the members of the club.

Hindus and Muslims make up nearly 64 percent of the population in the Kadamtala subdivision, which also includes the market, and Muslims make up nearly 35 percent of that population. Muslims, the state’s largest minority group, also make up about 9 percent of Tripura’s population of 3.6 million.

Traditional payment plans for Durga Puja celebrations by Muslims in Kadamtala and the nearby Hindu-majority North Tripura serve as a sign of reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims. The state’s chief minister, Makan Saha, had previously warned organizations against using force to collect Durga Puja subscription fees.

The situation, on October 6, however, snowballed by the evening, as Hindu and Muslim groups clashed, leading to the heavy deployment of security personnel. The police baton-charged the mobs and opened fire, according to reports.

Seventeen people, mostly police personnel, were injured in the communal clashes and one person died.

It was Alfeshani. “He was on the phone with me when a bullet hit him on the head”, Shahin Ahmed, Alfeshani’s brother, told Al Jazeera.

Bhanupada Chakraborty, who was North Tripura district’s superintendent of police at that time, however, said that police did not target anyone specifically, and Alfeshani’s cause of death is “under investigation”.

His family, however, dispute the police’s version. “He was shot in the head by the police”, Alifjaan Begum, Alfeshani’s mother, said, welling up. “My heart will never be sputtering,” he said. It was a murder”.

The trigger

A delegation of Muslims earlier earlier requested that the local police make an arrest for the alleged assault on the Muslim driver and passenger. In response to the alleged assault on the Muslim driver and passenger, the Kadamtala police also detained two other people. Following a protest by the local Muslims, they were detained.

A member of the Muslim delegation who requested anonymity claimed that another Durga Puja organizer made an “inflammatory comment” about the Prophet Muhammad on Facebook. The comment can be independently verified by Al Jazeera.

An irate Muslim group went looking for the young man in a Hindu-dominated neighbourhood. “They pelted stones and broke down doors and windows, creating a scene of panic among the Hindus, and asked them to hand over the Hindu boy to them”, Bibhu Debnath, secretary of the Kadamtala Market Association, told Al Jazeera.

That in turn enraged Hindus. A few Muslim businesses in the Kadamtala market were targeted by groups affiliated with the Hindu majoritarian Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological heart of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which also governs in Tripura.

As the back-and-forth rioting by the two groups intensified, Alfeshani tried to escape.

He couldn’t.

“Selectively burned”

Suhail Ahmed Khan, 40, finally arrived at his shop in the Kadamtala market early on October 8th. It was a five-minute ride from home, but it took two days before it was safe for him to go there, because of the violence.

On the market’s edge, local Hindus and a mob from outside Kadamtala that are suspected of belonging to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal, allegedly affiliated with the RSS, had gathered a day earlier on October 7. Then they made their way to the market, “burning and looting houses”, said a local political leader, Heera Lal Nath from the opposition Congress party. Tapas Roy, RSS’s publicity-in-charge in Tripura denied these allegations.

Khan’s shop was burned to a cinder. In the Kadamtala market, which also housed smartphones and other electronic devices, was also looted.

Khan had invested all of his life’s savings in this establishment. “Over 57 lakh rupees]$67, 550] had gone in flames”, Khan said, struggling to talk. “With such loss, my life became death”.

“It was collective punishment”, Khan said, struggling to talk. “They have ruined us both mentally and economically”.

The Kadamtala Jama mosque was also set on fire by a mob on October 7 and is located right next to the Kadamtala Market. “They burned all the religious books”, Abdul Motin, adviser to the Kadamtala Jama mosque committee, told Al Jazeera.

On the market’s outskirts in the Saraspur neighbourhood, Islam Uddin, who is 40, is rebuilding his charred home. His house was among the 10 Muslim-owned dwellings, located in a neighbourhood with a sizeable Hindu population, which were torched by a mob on the same day on October 7.

“My family and I had to flee for our lives”, he said.

His neighbour, Atarun Nessa, whose home was burned, is now surviving on charity from local NGOs. Her family’s only source of income – an e-rickshaw that her husband, Siraj Uddin, would ply – was charred by the Hindu mob.

“It was the only way for us to manage a morsel”, 47-year-old Nessa told Al Jazeera, breaking down. What kind of existence are we currently experiencing?

Several witnesses, requesting anonymity, claimed that the police stood by as “spectators” when the irate Hindu mob was carrying out the rampage on October 7.

Local legislator Islam Uddin, from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), claimed the police allowed the arson. “If]police] wanted, they could have stopped the Hindu mob”, he said, and added that “it all felt like they were picking a side”.

Sudip Roy Barman, a legislator from the opposition Congress party, said that violence in Kadamtala was “state-sponsored” by the BJP. “The BJP wanted to instigate the Muslims”.

When reached for comment, Chakraborty, the then-superintendent of North Tripura’s police, told Al Jazeera: “I am not the right person to speak with the press”.

Al Jazeera’s calls to the Tripura police chief, Amitabh Ranjan, were not answered. Al Jazeera has also sent a thorough questionnaire to his office, but it hasn’t yet responded. He, however, has previously rebuffed allegations of police inaction during the violence.

Muslims “live in fear,” according to the statement.

Following tensions that erupted repeatedly in August and October over claims that Muslims had defaced Hindu deities, the clashes in Kadamtala are just the most recent instances of interreligious conflict in Tripura. In retaliation, mosques were attacked, and in some cases, Muslim homes were burned.

These recent attacks recall the horror of the massive riots that erupted in the state in 2021 for Sultan Ahmed, a militant from Tripura and national secretary of the Students Islamic Organization of India, a student body.

According to Ahmed, “Muslims in Tripura still feign what actually happened.”

Large Hindu mobs, affiliated with far-right groups, attacked Muslim homes and mosques across many districts in the state, especially in North Tripura, which shares a 96km-long (60-mile) border with Bangladesh.

Following the discovery of a Hindu deity’s cross on a Hindu deity’s knee during Durga Puja celebrations, Muslim mobs in Bangladesh launched the attacks.

Muslims in North Tripura are on edge because of any attacks on Hindus since then, Ahmed said.

Hindus have “changed,” they say.

Bengalis and tribal communities have long been the subject of ethnic violence in Tripura. The sleepy hill state, however, did not have a history of clashes on religious lines between Hindus and Muslims.

Until Modi’s BJP came to power in 2018.

While the Ministry of Home Affairs of India no longer publishes statistics on interreligious riots, data from the National Crime Record Bureau on statewide riots from 2016 to 2020 shows that Tripura only reported two instances of communal violence, and those same cases were in 2019.

However, that number has risen sharply since, with Hindu groups trying to “foment communal sentiments” in about a dozen instances since 2018, Uddin, the lawmaker from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), said.

Right-wing organizations have been alleged to be attacking state-owned rubber plantations where Muslims in the state have claimed that an old mosque is a temple.

Muslim men have also been lynched by Hindu mobs in recent years.

BJP’s spokesperson in Tripura, Subrata Chakraborty, told Al Jazeera that “no such]group] gets privilege under the current government”.

“This government is pro-active government and pro-development government”, Chakraborty said.

Meanwhile, Kadamtala remains tense. According to Khan, whose Hindu shop was set on fire by a Hindu mob, “Muslims who account for 70% of customers in the market now do not want to buy anything from there.” It will take years, or maybe never, to restore the harmony that once existed.

For Abdul Haque, a former member of the BJP’s minority wing in Kadamtala, the recent violence was emblematic of a broader shift.

“Earlier, during Hindu festivals, they would fix the loudspeaker in a way that it does not disturb the Muslims, but now, they crank up the loudspeakers and play provocative songs”, he said.

Source: Aljazeera