NEW DELHI: Muslims residing in the Indian capital New Delhi are living in enclaves far from the country’s Hindu majority in their quest for safety in the face of rising anti-Muslim hate speech, while they still appear haunted by riots murders of 2020.

Nasreen and her husband Tofik are one of those couples who resided in Shiv Vihar, an emerging neighborhood in northeast New Delhi. However, the February 2020 riots then saw Muslims targeted and Tofik – according to a police report he filed days later from hospital – was pushed by a crowd from the second floor of the building. the building where they lived.

Although Tofik survived, he now has a permanent limp and only returned to his job selling clothes on the street after spending almost three years recovering.

Shortly after the riots, the couple moved to Loni, a more isolated area with poorer infrastructure and job prospects, but with a large Muslim population.

“I will not return to this area. I feel safer among Muslims,” ​​Tofik, who like his wife goes by one name, told Reuters.

The news agency interviewed about two dozen people, who highlighted the Muslim population’s estrangement from Hindus.

The details of this phenomenon, which led to a major Muslim neighborhood in Delhi running out of space, have not yet been reported.

There is no official data on segregation in India, whose long-delayed census also means there are few reliable figures on how much Muslim enclaves have grown over the past decade. Muslims make up about 14% of India’s 1.4 billion people.

Delhi’s ground zero is the central Jamia Nagar district, which has long been a temporary sanctuary for Muslims when communal riots break out.

With the ever-increasing influx of Muslims, the neighborhood is overflowing, despite a construction boom, according to ten local leaders, including politicians, activists and clergy, as well as five real estate agents.

“No matter how brave a Muslim is, he feels compelled to move, because if a mob comes, how brave can you be?” said Raes Khan, a real estate agent in south Delhi, who said Muslim clients now almost exclusively demand homes in Muslim-majority areas like Jamia Nagar.

Nationwide segregation has increased significantly over the past decade, said Raphael Susewind, a political anthropologist at the London School of Economics who has overseen long-term fieldwork on India’s Muslim population.

The rise of Islamophobia under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which came to power in 2014, is a “key driver” of this trend, he said.

Six Muslim community leaders said significant anecdotal evidence supports Susewind’s claim that segregation has increased.

Jamia Nagar pastor Md Sahil said the number of worshipers at his mosque’s morning prayers had more than doubled to over 450 in the last four to five years, and that this reflected the overall increase in population.

In response to questions from Reuters, Jamal Siddiqui, a senior BJP official in charge of minority affairs, suggested that poorer Muslims might choose to live in segregated areas because those neighborhoods tend to be more affordable. “Educated Muslims are leaving the region and settling in developed areas with mixed populations,” he explained.

However, Syed Sayeed Hasan, a Congress party worker from Jamia Nagar, said the 2020 riots were a big factor in favor of sectarian cloistering in Delhi.

More than 200 people were injured and at least 53 people, mostly Muslims, were killed during protests after Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu nationalist government moved to introduce a law making it easier for many non-Muslims to enter to citizenship.

A 2020 Delhi government report blamed the riots on BJP leaders who made speeches calling for violence against protesters. At the time, the party said the allegations were baseless and law enforcement said there was no evidence that any of the leaders accused in the report were responsible.

The Delhi government, controlled by the opposition Aam Aadmi Party, did not respond to requests for comment.

Increase in hate speech

India’s National Crime Records Bureau, a government agency that collects and analyzes crime data, does not keep records of targeted violence against communities.

It says the average number of annual communal riots declined by about 9% between 2014 and 2022 compared to the previous nine years, when the Congress party ruled India.

But independent experts at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, a Washington-based think tank, have documented a significant increase in anti-Muslim hate speech, from 255 incidents in the first half of 2023 to 413 in the second half of 2023. BJP politicians and affiliated groups have played a key role in this trend, the think tank said.

Reuters has previously reported how right-wing “cow vigilantes,” some of whom have links to the BJP, have carried out lynchings against Muslims.

Prime Minister Modi, while campaigning in April for a third term as prime minister, attacked Muslims as “infiltrators” who had “more children”, implying they were a threat for India’s Hindu majority.

BJP’s Siddiqui added that the prime minister was referring to undocumented immigrants like Rohingya Muslims who he said are “living in India and also weakening India”.

Asked earlier about alleged anti-Muslim bias, the BJP government said it did not discriminate and that many of its anti-poverty programs had benefited Muslims, who are among the poorest groups in India.

The BJP was only able to form a fragile coalition government after the national election results were announced in June. In the immediate aftermath, at least eight incidents of anti-Muslim lynching were reported, the nongovernmental Association for the Protection of Civil Rights said July 5.

Safety, a key factor

Jamia Nagar is a cluster of busy lanes behind Jamia Millia Islamia, a Muslim university that was the epicenter of the 2020 protests. It is the anchor of an area of ​​southeast Delhi that has many Muslim neighborhoods and a population of about 150,000, according to state election data.

When Reuters visited the enclave’s cramped lanes on a sweltering summer day, they were surrounded by five-story buildings. Developers have added three stories to many two-story buildings to meet increased demand, two real estate agents said. In a sign of booming growth, dozens of newly built kindergartens have also been set up in the neighborhood’s narrow lanes.

Most Muslim enclaves are not as developed. A 2023 study by British, American and Indian economists analyzing 1.5 million Indian regions found that public services like water and schools were relatively scarce in neighborhoods popular with Muslims and that the children of these Areas were often disadvantaged in education.

After Tofik and Nasreen moved to Loni following Tofik’s assault, their income was cut in half, with Tofik only able to work reduced hours.

Nasreen’s 16-year-old daughter Muskan suffered. The school in suburban Delhi was under-resourced, Muskan said, and he missed his classmates. After feeling that the new school was not for her, she dropped out.

But Nasreen does not regret this decision. “I’ll never go back there. I lost faith in them,” she said of the neighbors she said were part of the crowd that pushed her husband.

Reuters could not independently verify the claim, but Sam Sundar, a 44-year-old Hindu living in the old Nasreen neighborhood, said Hindus and Muslims had suffered in the riots, which he blamed on external authors.

But he acknowledged that Muslims have paid the price: “Very few Muslims now live in the region. This is not a good thing.”

Nasreen’s neighbor Malika also moved to the suburbs after her husband’s death during the 2020 riots. But she failed to find a job and now lives part-time in a small room in another neighborhood with more Hindu residents, where she is close to construction sites where she does odd jobs.

“Here I am plagued by poverty, there I am plagued by insecurity,” Malika said.

The enclaves have also attracted upper-middle-class Muslim families, who previously lived more comfortably in mixed areas, said Raes, the real estate agent.

“People think it is better to live in separate areas rather than being constantly threatened for their lives and property by members of the other community,” said Mujahid Nafees, a Muslim leader in South Sudan state. Gujarat, where Modi is from, is home to India’s largest Muslim enclave. some 400,000.