A year and a half ago, Hindus and Muslims clashed on the streets of one of Britain’s most diverse cities. What is the violence?
On Saturday 17 September 2022, the weekend before the Queen’s funeral, 300 men marched through Leicester. Their faces were hidden by Covid masks and balaclavas as they made their way to Green Lane Road in Highfields, an area in east Leicester with a large Muslim population. On WhatsApp, it had been billed as a Hindu neighbourhood safety march. “It’s very important for every Hindu to attain [sic] this meeting,” an organiser wrote. “Otherwise in future, we will have to live in fear.”
It was early in the evening and as the men passed rows of terraced houses, red-brick warehouses and Piccadilly cinemas, heralding a Hindi epic set during the British Raj, they chanted “Jai Shree Ram” (“Victory of Lord Rama”). The word has long been a risk-free devout faith, yet in recent decades it has been linked to the politics of Hindu nationalism in India, where activists use it as a rallying cry in campaigns of intimidation and violence against minorities, especially Muslims. The men also shouted other slogans that have been linked to the Hindu right: “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” (“Victory to Mother India”) and “Vande Mataram” (“Praise to the [Indian] Mother”).
When the news spread on WhatsApp, counter-protests were temporarily formed, mainly composed of Muslim men. Many local policemen had been sent to London for the state funeral, but those who remained were sent to check to separate the crowd. A man, filming with his phone, called a police officer to make arrests. “I don’t know what they’re saying,” the officer admitted. “The challenge is that if we arrest one person, they all leave. “
What began with an organization of Hindus marching into a “Muslim zone” ended with teams of Muslims following them into the city’s “Hindu zone”: Belgrave Road, about 2. 4 kilometers to the north, a bustling grocery shopping street lined with jewelry stores and shops. Places to eat. As evening fell, fights broke out. A young Indian man driving a car was attacked with his head cut off after false rumours spread that he had tried to run over people. The chaos spread to local businesses. I talked to someone who was having dinner around 9 p. m. m. at a place to eat dosa in Belgrave Road when a young man ran in, barefoot, seeking shelter after being attacked; Some other men who were bleeding also tried to get in. Terrified, the restaurant’s owners rolled down the shutters and turned off the lights.
Across Belgrave Road there was a clash between the two teams, with bottles flying through the air, which lasted until police dispersed them in the early hours of the morning. The most incendiary video of the night was recorded here: a guy jumped over the walls of a Hindu temple and knocked down a saffron-colored devotional flag; Another clip shows a flag being set on fire. These photographs went viral and serve as a visual shorthand for the intensity of the devout discord. The next day, at around four in the afternoon, a mob of Muslim men attempted to march down Belgrave Road shouting “Allahu Akbar”. ” before a line of police. Within days, disorder seemed to spread across the Midlands: a loud protest took place outside a Hindu temple in Smethwick, just west of Birmingham, in reaction to the (aborted) plan to organize a conference through a Hindu nationalist ideologue from India.
Speak to people in Leicester about why this all happened and you will hear different starting points. Even by beginning this story with the march on 17 September, I will have irked those who think a more appropriate starting point is late August, when a house in which Hindus were celebrating a religious festival was egged, or, a few days after that, when a Hindu man was stabbed in the arm, reportedly by a Muslim assailant. (The victim would go on to be one of the organisers of the march, though he later said that his aim had been just to organise “a normal protest”.) Or 28 August, when India beat Pakistan at cricket in the Asia Cup in Dubai and jubilant fans chanted “Pakistan Murdabad” – “Death to/Down with Pakistan” – in the streets and a fight broke out. Or even as far back as May, when a group of young men allegedly asked someone if he was Muslim before attacking him.
But it was the violence of September 17 and 18 that transformed a local story into something much more gigantic. Around 370,000 more people live in Leicester; According to data collected in the 2021 census, 23. 5% are Muslim and 17. 9% are Hindu, with the majority of both groups having Indian heritage. With gigantic Somali and Eastern European populations, the city is what sociologists call “super diversity. “According to the 2021 census, Leicester became, along with Birmingham, one of the first cities in the UK to have a non-white majority. But while white racist politics has been a hallmark of Leicester’s history — from the National Front that won thousands of votes in the 1970s to the English Defence League’s march on the city in 2010 — this kind of violent enmity on a giant scale between Hindus and Muslims is a reality. New. ” It’s nothing we’ve ever noticed on the streets of Leicester,” Sharmen Rahmen, former city councillor. he told me last June.
Suddenly, politicians, diplomats, activists, influencers, pressure groups and the global media turned their attention to Leicester. To many observers, it seemed that India’s often violent, sectarian politics were playing out on Britain’s streets. On Monday 19 September, the Indian high commission in London released a remarkably undiplomatic statement condemning “the violence perpetrated against the Indian community in Leicester and vandalisation of premises and symbols of Hindu religion”. Although Leicester’s Pakistani population is small (3.4% in 2021), the Pakistan high commission saw fit to issue its own statement, condemning the “systematic campaign of violence and intimidation that has been unleashed against the Muslims of the area”. In India, a demonstration was held under the banner “UK Save Hindus”, while Indian newspapers reported on “communal clashes” in the UK and the hashtag #HindusUnderAttack trended on Twitter. India’s foreign affairs minister raised the issue with the UK government.
The city has been deeply shaken and the aftermath is still being felt. Last year, Suella Braverman, then clerk of the British House of Representatives, gave a speech in which she cited Leicester as an example of the “failure” of multiculturalism. Two inquiries are underway – one led by communities secretary Michael Gove and chaired by Lord Ian Austin, who resigned from the Labour Party under Jeremy Corthroughn and knighted by Boris Johnson, and the other chaired by a former UN special rapporteur and founded at Soas University of London. Leicester Mayor Peter Soulsthrough said he feared neither “will be perceived as genuinely impartial”.
However, there is one surprising – and underrated – facet of what happened in Leicester: this weekend’s chances were, at least on the surface, minor. A year later, another 32 people were convicted of offences including offences against public order, possession of weapons and fighting. No one died or was left in critical condition. As one observer told me, there are more damaging football matches. In other words, the scale of reaction has nothing to do with the scale of violence.
Which made the ‘Troubles’, the ‘Riots’, the ‘Troubles’ (no one can agree on a single term) so difficult that they seemed to reveal hidden faults running through England, adding to the transformative nature of the situation. racial policy, in a context of austerity, low economic expansion and new migratory flows. And beyond those national considerations is a larger question: how could the ultra-nationalist environment of Narendra Modi’s India grow beyond its borders?
On a quiet day last summer, Sanjay Modhwadia took me on a tour to his garment factory in east Leicester. There was almost no one inside, for his business partner, Alkesh, who worked in a workplace scented with burning incense, and for Alkesh’s young children. , who ran with mischievous freedom during the summer holidays. The sewing machines had been put away. Rolls of cloth were stored. In front of the entrance, a sign that had previously indicated vacant positions (hems, pointers, sergers) was now hidden.
Modhwadia embodies two trends that give meaning to what happened in Leicester: the ailing economy in the east of the city and its local factional politics. Tall and relaxed, he drove me to the textile district of Green Lane Road in a white van. “The garment industry has completely dried up,” he said, speaking in confident but imperfect English. (Modhwadia came to Britain from Gujarat in the early 1990s. )
In 2020 there were 1,000 garment factories in Leicester; It is now estimated that this number has been halved. Industry experts cite energy costs, outsourcing, a higher minimum wage, and the effects of a primary scandal in 2020, the pandemic, when the “open secret” of underpayment of minimum wages in the sector came to light. Workers in some factories were paid as little as £3. 50 an hour; Fast fashion logo, Boohoo, has noted that its price has lost more than £1 billion. I asked Modhwadia if he thought unemployment in the sector might have contributed to the unrest in 2022. He said it was possible. ” Every day, more than 20 people call me to ask for work,” he said.
Modhwadia is well placed to answer those questions because he’s not just a local businessman. He is also a Conservative councillor. In fact, he was the Conservative Party’s candidate for mayor of the city in last year’s election, garnering 26,422 votes and scaring Peter Soulsby (35,002). Soulsby is a tough figure in the city, having served as leader of the Labour Council, MP and elected mayor during his several decades of politics in Leicester. “I missed the mayor of the city a bit,” Modhwadia told me, laughing at the improbability of it all.
Modhwadia, who is Hindu, recently entered politics. He became an adviser after winning the by-elections in October 2022, a month after the violence. During the campaign, a photograph of his Labour rival circulated on social media alongside a cardboard cutout of Narendra Modi. The concept that the Labour candidate was pro-Modi, or even a member of his Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, spread locally. (The candidate denied being a member of the BJP) swing 19 points in favour of Modwadhia, and Labour fell to third place, the Greens. The episode seemed to confirm a suspicion: Indian politics was a ghost at the Leicester table.
Then there was the run-up to last year’s local elections, when the Labour Party told 19 of its own councillors they would not be allowed to run. The news was picked up by The Times of India and Indian television, which reported that all members of the Hindu advisers party had been blocked. In parts of east Leicester, a leaflet was distributed reading “Labour suppresses all Hindu councillors”. Outside observers speculated that this resolution had something to do with the 2022 riots, but it turns out that it is ultimately a familiar story to fans of Labour Party politics: a story of centralism and control. The smug councillors came from other devout backgrounds, but most of them had voted that same year to abolish the elected mayor’s office. oppose Soulsthrough in a high-stakes vote. (The Soulsthrough workplace did not respond to requests for comment. )
When it came to the local elections, Labour paid the price. While the rest of England gave the impression of voting against the Conservatives (the party lost more than 1,000 councillors), there was a blue wave in Leicester, with the Conservatives winning 17 seats on the council. The new councillors, many of whom were of Indian origin, performed well in neighbourhoods with gigantic Hindu populations. After the results, Soulsby told the BBC Leicester that he believed faith had been “weaponized. “(Other observers told me that the divide between Labour and Leicester Hindus dates back to 2019, when one of the city’s MPs presided over a consultation at the party convention challenging India’s claims to the disputed territory of Kashmir. In that year’s general election, the Friends of the British BJP parties brazenly carried out a nationwide awareness crusade, seeking to alienate the electorate away from the “anti-Indians. “)
Local politics can be brutal. It is where the political is always personal. But there is something else that makes it particularly fraught: austerity. Since 2010, council spending on services other than social care in Leicester has been cut by at least 50%. A small but telling example: if you had walked by the city’s customer service centre in 2019 and looked at the opening hours in the window, it would have said Monday to Friday. Now it is only open two days a week. Rita Patel, a former assistant mayor of Leicester, told me that cuts had reduced the city’s finances to the “bare bones” and that it was no longer able to help newly arrived migrants find their feet. She also spoke of Leicester’s bruising experience with the pandemic – it went through the country’s longest lockdown.
Austerity has perverse consequences: when Labour-led councils administer budget cuts, it’s the local Conservatives who benefit. But it also has mental effects. As public resources dwindle, politics becomes more desperate. Communities are fighting for what’s left. In June, Patel told me he thought the city was headed for a black hole in its finances. In October, I read that it was “almost inevitable” that Leicester would stick to several other forums and file for bankruptcy. All this in a city once considered one of the richest in Europe.
It wasn’t until the second half of the century that Leicester acquired the badge it still wears today, as a bustling example of multicultural England. When the writer JB Priestley visited Leicester in the early 1930s, it struck him as rather dull. “It seemed,” he wrote, “to lack character, to be busy and cheerful and industrial and built of red brick, and to be nothing else.”
The first significant cohort of Asian settlers arrived after World War II. It was a small network (less than 5,000 inhabitants in 1961) but it has been socially and culturally consolidated. The largest wave of migration occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s and largely included Asian “double migrants”, those who had settled in countries such as Kenya and Uganda under the auspices of British colonialism. When those countries gained their independence and implemented “Africanization” policies, many Asians left. In the case of Uganda, they were deported with 90 days’ notice.
There’s a dark and funny story about why so many Asian Ugandans chose Leicester. In 1972, the city council placed an ad in Uganda’s Argus newspaper telling people that the city was complete and that conditions were not as good as when the former immigrants arrived. The joke is that instead of discouraging other people, he simply alerted them to the fact that there was already an Asian network in Leicester, and that’s how they got there. The locals I spoke to were full of poignant stories about settling down in the city. over the decades, from the first time they saw snow to the corner store owner who imported Bollywood video reels for their nostalgia.
Gurharpal Singh, a political scientist who lived in and studied the Asian colony of Leicester, arrived from Punjab in 1964, when he was 8 years old. “I’ve noticed that the city went from being a white city to a melting pot,” he told me when we met on the campus of the University of Leicester. He remembers the dreaded school football games in the whitest western part of the city, because then Asians would get beaten up. “When I tell that to my kids, they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s traumatic,’ and I said, ‘Well, that’s just one component of the game. ‘”
Over time, Leicester developed a reputation as being a “model” for multiculturalism, in part because it avoided strife such as the 2001 “race riots” in northern mill-towns – when the far-right provoked violence with British-Asians. In a 2003 paper for Unesco, Singh tried to work out why this was. He chalked it down to three factors. First, many of the migrants who came in the 60s and 70s were of professional backgrounds. They set up small businesses or they found jobs in a “buoyant” local economy that needed male and female workers. Second, they didn’t compete for social housing, as happened elsewhere, instead choosing cheap private housing in inner-city areas such as Belgrave and Highfields. Third, the local Labour party recognised the electoral value of the Asian vote, and the city council embraced multiculturalism as policy.
The “Leicester model” was always somewhat illusory. “Because the underlying reality of Leicester was it was a partition city,” Singh told me. Asians tended to live in east Leicester, the white working class in the west and the more affluent in the south. But one thing that did unite south Asians of all faiths in Britain was a common enemy: racism. The National Front campaigned heavily in Leicester after the Ugandan Asians arrived, and often received sympathetic coverage in the local press. Joining the resistance were organisations from the Indian Workers’ Association to local outfits like the Highfields and Belgrave Defence Campaign. In the 70s and 80s, south Asians involved in organised anti-racism often identified as black, which connoted a political affiliation as much as a racial identity, and helped build bridges between disparate groups. In Leicester, people were doubly united by a regional ancestry and language, as many of them were originally from Gujarat. People in the city I spoke to said that, growing up in the 70s, 80s or 90s, religion was not a significant source of division.
But the communities slowly drifted apart. After the 1981 riots across England (inner-city riots against unemployment and police brutality), central and local governments allocated budgets to ethnic minority groups; those paid for things like salaries, network extension workers, and devoted vacations. For some, it was an imperfect but valuable reaction to the racism of the time. Others argue that these projects have softened the boundaries of anti-racist policy. The average budget of the City of Leicester, Singh writes, “became the basis for building a client-client relationship between local government and ethnic networking groups. “The agreement has dissipated the unity that once existed among minority groups, said Priya Thamotheram, who runs a networking centre in Leicester. “Now,” he told me, “it’s not about what’s common between us, what unites us, but what’s unique to us and what we can participate in and get funding for. “
These national trends have been accelerated by global events. Several points (the fatwa against Salman Rushdie on September 11, the “war on terror”, the rise of Islamophobia) have led to an increase in the dominance of Muslim identities. Meanwhile, Hindu nationalist politics, with the confirmation of Hindu pride as the main theme, took off electorally in India in the 1990s with the good fortune of the BJP and reverberated in the diaspora. The Muslim Council of Great Britain was established in 1997; the Hindu Forum in Great Britain in 2004. Political obscurity, and even the broader perception of “Asian” identity, has receded in history as faith has come to the fore.
Something else has changed since the heyday of the Leicester model: more Indians have migrated to the city. This matters because many of the young men who marched to Green Lane Road in September 2022 were drawn from relatively new migrant communities. In particular, they hailed from Daman and Diu, two coastal territories next to Gujarat. These places were not colonised by Britain, but Portugal, which only relinquished its Indian colonies in 1961. Through this twist of history, many people from Daman and Diu are eligible for Portuguese citizenship. Some ended up settling in Britain as European citizens before Brexit. At the time of the 2021 census, there were 18,862 Portuguese passport holders in Leicester – that’s 5.1% of the city’s population, the largest such proportion in the UK.
The Daman and Diu communities are challenging the stereotypical symbol of British Hindus as well-to-do professionals. Many paintings in Leicester’s textile industry or in storage spaces. (One of the biggest employers in town is a company called Samworth Brothers, where staff and temp staff (make salads and pies for big brands. ) It is not uncommon for multiple families to live under the same roof. Perhaps because of their hardships, the Daman and Diu are also culturally confident: they proudly celebrate their Hinduism. In the vicinity of Green Lane Road, you can tell what spaces they live in through the devout iconography of the windows and doors (crucifixes and verses from the Koran also adorn some spatial facades).
Last summer, I visited a workplace on Belgrave Road called Daman and Diu NRI Services (NRI stands for non-resident Indian). I waited while the owner, Ashwin Patel, spoke in Gujarati to a young woman who needed help. Her husband had died. she, she told me later, and she was explaining to me the help they could get in case of grief. I asked him what the biggest challenge was facing the other Daman and Diu people in Leicester. His answer was simple: “No job. ” I was struck by the fact that these recent immigrants had arrived in a country very different from their Asian ancestors: a country with less particular racism, but with a stripped public domain and an economy more suited to the interests of asset owners. than those of other people who still have nothing in their job.
One day, in the city centre, I met a Muslim guy from Daguy, who had arrived before Brexit and was now working as a delivery driver on UberEats. He seemed puzzled by my interest in him and didn’t need me to mention him by name. , because he thought his English wasn’t smart enough. He spoke directly and unvarnished about violence. He said his friends had been involved in some fights, but things had calmed down. He advised that, in general, Hindus don’t like them. “It’s like India,” he says. They can be friends growing up and not communicate like adults. “
Perhaps the core disagreement about what actually happened in Leicester in September 2022 concerns the question of outside involvement. Faith groups and some councillors have referred to unnamed “outsiders” who they blame for stirring up discontent in an otherwise harmonious city. One common refrain after the violence was that the RSS was behind it. The uniformed, quasi-paramilitary group, which is the ideological parent of India’s ruling BJP, dreams of transforming secular India into an avowedly Hindu nation, in which minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians, pay fealty to Hindu supremacy as a condition of their continued presence. Although Indian secularism since independence has been less robust in practice than its liberal cheerleaders like to believe, under Modi – an RSS member since he was a teenager – the Hindu nationalist vision has been pursued with a zeal that would have once seemed unimaginable. The Daman and Diu marchers have been described by some Muslim activists as “RSS thugs”, adopting tactics familiar from India, where provocative marches are a staple of Hindu supremacist groups.
The idea that the RSS was blatantly establishing itself in Leicester is fanciful. But what is attractive – and not widely publicised – is that Leicester is home to the British headquarters of an organisation widely believed to be the foreign branch of the RSS. the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS). ” The HSS is organised in exactly the same way as the RSS in India,” says Professor Christophe Jaffrelot, an expert on Hindu nationalism at King’s College London.
Founded in 1966 by east African Asians, today the HSS UK claims to run more than 100 weekly shakhas, or branches, across Britain, attended by more than 2,000 people. There is a focus on yoga, games, youth activities, charity and active citizenship. Last summer, I visited a building near Belgrave Road that houses the group’s head office. On the ground floor is a bookshop that sells religious and pro-RSS literature, alongside colourful children’s books. I bought a copy of Delhi Riots: The Untold Story, which gives a revisionist account of communal violence that took place in Delhi in 2020 and left at least 53 dead, the majority Muslim. (The book argues that the violence was ultimately caused by jihadists in cahoots with the far left.) I started speaking to two men, perhaps in their 70s, who appeared to work there. One was friendly even after I told him I was writing about Leicester; he carried on speaking until the other man ever so gently raised his hand, indicating to his friend that he should stop.
HSS UK trustees told the Charity Commission that there is no formal link between him and the RSS, only an “ideological commonality”, as the commission put it. But the group’s relationship with RSS is public and visible. Its headquarters in Leicester were opened in 1995 by the then ideal leader of the RSS. In 2016, the current leader of the RSS was the guest of honour at the HSS 50th anniversary birthday party in Hertfordshire.
HSS UK stated that “as far as it is aware, none of the participants in HSS (UK) activities were attacked or affected by the riots in Leicester. ” But their presence in the city, and that of other groups, is a testament to infrastructure lifestyles and ideologues dating back decades. And it serves to correct the simplistic notion that such concepts have recently been ‘imported’ to Leicester via ‘foreigners’ or immigrants who are easily scapegoated.
A constellation of organisations that could be described as following Hindutva – the name given to the ideology of Hindu nationalism – exist in Britain, as the academic Edward TG Anderson explains in his new book, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora. Their discourse has recurring themes: there are appeals to ideas of the model minority citizen (it is observed that Hindus are underrepresented in prison populations), a keen sense of victimhood (there is an effort to popularise the idea of “Hinduphobia”) and the notion the British Hindus have failed to organise themselves as effectively as other minority groups. The sense that Hindus are under threat is common. “There are many challenges that our community is facing,” the HSS UK’s president, Dhiraj Shah, is reported to have said at a 2020 conference. “Once I heard that in Leicester almost every week three or four Hindus are being converted. Now, I cannot confirm, but this gives the scale of things that are happening in our community.”
These words reminded me of a poster I saw in the window of the Daman Community Center in Leicester. Organized through a group, it advertised a ‘Hinduism Awareness Campaign’ seminar on ‘Religious Preparation and Conversion in the UK’. familiar to the British far right, but has also long been a source of political anxiety for Hindu nationalists in India, where it takes the form of a grand surrogate conspiracy theory that portrays Hindu women as victims of a ” jihad of love. ” seduced and changed through Muslim men. (The president of the network center did not respond to requests for comment. HSS UK did not agree to schedule an interview with Dhiraj Shah, and the organization declined to answer questions via email, stating that “given the narrow scope of the interrogation and “Given the Guardian’s media policy on issues such as the Leicester riots, we are not sure that the Guardian provides a fair and comprehensive HSS (UK) policy. “)
Hinduism is a strangely complex religion, made up of many sects and traditions, and many Hindus I spoke to in Leicester had never heard of such organizations. The pretensions of diaspora nationalist teams to speak on behalf of some kind of unified network forget this irrepressible diversity. According to a 2021 YouGov poll, 37% of British Hindus said they approved of Modi’s performance as prime minister and 43% said they disapproved. Many simply don’t know much about it or don’t care about those kinds of issues at all.
But in politics, length or duration are not everything: the issues are organizational skills. Some of these teams have patiently cultivated relationships with parliamentarians and demonstrated a willingness to knock on doors. The Labour Party has not escaped the fact that it is among the British Indians, especially the Hindus. , has declined. Historically, British Indians were a reliable Labour electorate, however, a recent poll suggests that only 30% of British Indians voted for Labour in the 2019 general election and that the majority of the Indian electorate has gone conservative. Much of this is due to secular processes, such as the expansion of wealth, and their electoral significance. But any conservative political strategist worthy of his salary will think about how to take advantage of it.
Last year, on a grey November afternoon, I emerged from the Leicester exercise station just as a huge, slow-moving crowd appeared. Around 5,000 more people were demonstrating in aid of the other Gazans. As the crowd made its way to the main street, a bucket containing what appeared to be water was thrown from an upstairs balcony, narrowly avoiding other people. The crowd stared speechlessly at the user on the balcony who was yelling at them and made their way to the downtown clock tower, where other people were giving speeches. There were representatives of the Socialist Party and the Greens, as well as Leicester East MP Claudia Webbe. (Formerly Labour, Webbe serves as an independent after being convicted in 2021 of harassing a rival lover and expelled from the Labour Party. ) They spoke of Israel’s war in Gaza in secular and Huguyitarian language. Then a guy introduced as “community activist, social media activist” took the microphone.
Many other people in Leicester have a review about Majid Freeman. Some see him as a troublemaker who stoked enmity between Hindus and Muslims during the tense summer months of 2022. Others say they don’t agree with everything he says, but recognize that it reaches other people. in the network that major Muslim organizations don’t have. With his baseball cap and long beard, Freeman has a unique and ubiquitous presence in East Leicester. She has more than 43,000 followers on Instagram, a lot if you focus on a single city.
Freeman’s politics are neither left nor right: what seems to motivate him is advancing the interests of Muslims. In his speech that day, Freeman castigated the Labour MP for Leicester South, Jonathan Ashworth, who abstained in the ceasefire vote at parliament. He then turned his attention to the city’s “Muslim organisations”, which he framed as aloof, timid and complicit. “We need to ask these organisations to stop having private meetings with [politicians],” Freeman said. “There’s no public accountability.” He didn’t mention any by name, but I took him to be referring to the Federation of Muslim Organisations (FMO), founded in 1983 and seen by Leicester officialdom as the main Muslim community organisation. He ended his speech with a call and response of “Takbir – Allahu Akbar.”
People with an unfavourable view of Freeman will talk about his provocative social media posts in the run-up to the violence. In early September 2022, he shared a false rumour that a Muslim teenager had almost been kidnapped, though he deleted the posts and published a correction on Twitter when found out it wasn’t true. Later that month, he shared a video on Twitter that purported to show a recording of Daman and Diu people holding late-night religious festivities in mixed residential neighbourhoods, which was often cited that year as a source of inter-community tensions. “Is this normal acceptable behaviour?” he wrote. “Listen to the drunken mobs screaming at the end like hyenas at 3am. They felt invincible until now.” Things had only improved, he said, after Muslims started “patrolling the streets and making their presence known”.
To those who see him as belligerent, though, Freeman might point out that as the violence peaked on the night of 17 September, he intervened to protect a Hindu man from a mob. Sky news ran a story about it: “Hindu man thanks Muslim activist who stepped in to save him during night of Leicester violence”. (Freeman declined to be interviewed on the record, but he sent me a statement, maintaining his “profound love for Leicester”, his “strong connections with my Hindu neighbours, rooted in mutual respect and understanding” and his efforts “to bridge divides and foster dialogue between disparate groups”.)
Freeman is part of a digital ecosystem of religious-activist “influencers”. On Sunday 18 September 2022, two men known as Ali Dawah and Mohammed Hijab travelled from London to Leicester, where they met him. They are well-known figures in online Muslim circles and were recognised by people on the ground. “Hijab and Dawah belong to the most conservative modern variant of Sunni Islam,” Ashraf Hoque, an anthropologist at University College London, told me. “For them, it is a fundamental religious obligation for all Muslims to spread and purify the faith.” Emerging from the debating culture of Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, they are confident pundits, publishing an array of content on subjects like Islam, foreign affairs and Canadian culture warrior Jordan Peterson.
The video posted via Dawah on his YouTube channel (title: MUSLIMS’ HARSH MESSAGE TO HINDUTVA – THIS IS NOT INDIA!!) is a desirable insight into what happens when influencers encounter real-world politics. An organisation of Muslim men stands behind Belgrave Road, in front of a line of police. Hijab, an authoritarian and positive figure, makes her way to the front and tries to deal with them. “They’re more likely to pay attention to me than to you,” he tells a policeman. official. He tries to give a speech about “strategic goals,” but struggles to get their full attention. A user in the crowd says those other people aren’t from Leicester and are just there to “make an impact” on social media. . Dawah disagrees, arguing that making public what is happening is precisely the goal.
Things finally came to a halt that Sunday, but not before Hijab gave a speech in which she called the protesters “Hindutva” “violent vegetarians. “In another clip, he appears to mock Hindu beliefs, arguing that protesters were reincarnated as “cowardly” men. (He later claimed that his language was hyperbolic and that he did not intend to mock Hinduism as a religion. )There’s some laughter in the crowd, but they don’t seem sure of themselves. On YouTube, the top-rated comment below the video when I saw it seemed to document the network’s real-time awareness-raising: “Before, I wasn’t very religious, but after hearing that. . . Damn, I’m as proud of myself as a Hindu?.
“Nationalism at a distance” was the term used by historian Benedict Anderson to refer to the patriotic activity of a diaspora. In a 1990s writing, Anderson gave the example of Hindus in Britain and North America who raised money for the crusade to build a temple. in Ayodhya, India, in a position that many consider to be the birthplace of the deity Rama. Last month, Modi inaugurated the temple in a stunning rite that was the culmination of a decades-long crusade aimed at the destruction of a mosque on the site. In Leicester, there was a non-violent march in which worshippers chanted “Jai Shree”. RAM. “Keith Vaz, a former MP for Leicester East, who is still influential in his former constituency, gave a speech at a temple in which he paid tribute to Prime Minister Modi “for the paintings he has made”. A fog of calm has descended over the city, but, every once in a while, a potential hot spot like this appears.
During my several visits to the city last year, I asked people what, if anything, had really changed since September 2022. “I think we’d be better prepared from a policing perspective,” said Neil Chakraborti, a professor at Leicester University. “But in terms of thinking about the causes and digging more deeply, beyond the superficial ‘Let’s have dialogue with community leaders’ response? I’m not sure.” Last year, the government said it was expecting its review to be finished in 2024; now it is saying it might be early 2025. “Some people just want to forget about it,” said Rita Patel, the former assistant mayor. “There are other people who’ve been around a long time who see, like me, that unless you deal with the underlying issues, all that will happen is it’ll come back at the worst possible time.”
Patel pointed out that the women of Leicester hardly seemed to figure in any of this. Yes, they were men on the street. But “it’s the women who have to find the answers and, you know, draw a blank afterwards. “One hopeful occasion that occurred while I was reporting on the city was a protest in the textile industry. Organised through Labour Behind the Label, In October 2023, as part of a crusade for the rights of staff in the sector, 500 people, mostly women, gathered in a park in east Leicester. They condemned low wages in the sector and demanded better conditions. I also learned of a crusade to unionize the staff at Samworth Brothers, the food processing company where many immigrants paint.
An iconic and influential strike was led by Asian women in Leicester. In 1974, large numbers of Asian employees of the Imperial Typewriters Company demonstrated to protest the denial of the same promotions and bonuses as their white colleagues. The Transport and Other Workers’ Union did not recognize the strike as official. Battling racism from their employer and union, staff have been assertive, breaking down white prejudices about docile brown-skinned people. “The strike at Imperial Typewriters,” wrote a Race Today correspondent, “has, among other things, put an end to some myths. “
The huge factory building is still there, near Green Lane Road, with its sans-serif sign that reads IMPERIAL. When J. B. Priestley visited in the 1930s, he saw the “entrepreneurial spirit and ingenuity” of the staff who assembled the typewriters. The land is now used for a variety of purposes, adding kitchen supply retail stores and even a fitness center. One weekday morning in November, I nervously walked in and up a flight of stairs, locating some empty, padlocked studios where garment manufacturers once painted. With its damaged windows and dirty hallways, the building looked like a deserted monument. A man who looked after it told me that much of the area was now used as a garage and that no more than a hundred people painted there every day. The structure told the story of the trajectory of the British economy, from industries that required masses of people in a single physical space, side by side, to a smaller, compartmentalized bureaucracy of work and existence.
Afterwards I went across the road to a branch of Chaiiwalla, a chain of Indian cafes. As I sipped a hot, sweet cup of tea, a woman entered with her husband. They were looking for work. Years ago they might have been taken on by Imperial or the garment sector. There was no chance of that now. The man behind the counter said that there weren’t any vacancies here, but that she should try a branch elsewhere in town. The couple left and idled on the pavement outside. It was cold, about 6C, but the man was wearing sandals with no socks. He looked tired and a little lost. I asked him when he came to Britain. “Ten days ago,” he said. From where in India? “Tamil Nadu.” I told him that’s where my grandfather lives, and he nodded politely. What did they make of this country so far, I wondered, and how did they feel about the India they had left behind? I asked if they wanted a cup of tea, but his wife seemed suspicious. She said that they had to go, and so they did.
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