Hindu Nationalists Are Disrupting Muslim Prayers In India
A boy reads the Quran inside the Jama Masjid, one of India’s largest mosques, in New Delhi. Creative Commons photo.
GURGAON, India— Taufiq Ahmad owns a local shop in Gurgaon — also called Gurugram — just outside India’s capital, New Delhi, and offers prayers every Friday as the Quran instructs.
Ahmad used to attend this weekly “namaz” at Akshay Yadav’s shop. Yadav, a Hindu, provided his small store for local Muslims to pray in peace, but then protests and threats by Hindu extremist groups caused Muslim groups to shift locations.
“The issue is not for space but the namaz itself,” Taufiq said.
Gurgaon, a booming tech and finance hub of 1.5 million people, has grown faster than mosques have been built to accommodate Muslim residents, about 4.6% of the population. So local Muslims pray at 37 designated spaces permitted by the city administration — after having requested permission for 60 spaces in 2018. Part of the resistance against namaz spaces is over how much noise should be permitted in any given area. Namaz can often involve loudspeakers issuing a call to prayer and broadcasting a sermon.
Another part of the resistance stems from long-simmering Hindu nationalist rhetoric — called “Hinduvta” in India — that has grown under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government since 2014 and paints Islam as a religion foreign to India, though it has existed in India since the seventh century. Only about 14% of India’s population is Muslim, while 80% is Hindu, with little change in 70 years, according to Pew research. India is also home to 11% of the world’s Muslim population.
Hindu nationalist groups Bharat Mata Vahini and Sanyukt Hindu Sangharsh Samiti protested the city’s decision to allow these prayer spaces in September 2021, prompting the administration to revoke permission from eight prayer sites.
Yadav has helped the Muslim community in the past by providing spaces for namaz during Ramadan and did not want to comment.
“Akshay is reluctant now. Now the Hindutva groups are threatening the residents,” said Altaf Ahmed, co-founder of Gurugram Nagrik Ekta Manch, which has been helping fund and deliver meals to migrant workers in the area as unemployment and poverty have surged during the pandemic. Ahmed has been working to expand Muslim prayer spaces in Gurgaon for the last three years.
In late 2021, a Sikh temple called a “gurudwara,” Shri Guru Singh Sabha, opened up its space to Muslims. Sherdil Singh Sidhu, the head of the gurudwara committee, provided space in five nearby gurudwara spaces for Muslim Friday prayers, announcing in a statement that Muslim brothers are welcome to pray inside. The Sanyukt Hindu Sangharsh Samiti again opposed this move.
“When the gurudwara committee offered five gurudwara spaces, the Muslim community thought this might ease out our problem a bit,” said Ahmed. “But the gurudwara is now threatened to take back their help. We do not want to disrupt the peace, and we withdrew ourselves from offering namaz at the gurudwara.”
Daya Singh, spokesperson of the gurudwara and a member of Gurugram Nagrik Ekta Manch, emphasized what Sikhs and Muslims have in common.
“If someone comes and offers namaz, then why will we object?” Singh said. “We all believe in one God. A very simple thing to understand is that (Hindu nationalists) want to target Muslims. They want communities to fight. Muslims and Sikh are standing with each other, and there are no two ways about it.”
Many Gurgaon residents have supported and helped Muslims by not only offering spaces for worship but also helping them obtain their own private land to host prayers. This too has been met with resistance from some Hindu nationalist groups.
“We are asking for namaz space because the Indian constitution gave us the freedom of religion. We are eternally grateful for residents like Akshay and the gurudwara, but this is not a permanent solution for us,” Taufiq said.
Ahmed believes that the hidden agenda behind the protests and threats are state legislative elections coming up in India this spring.
“Elections are around the corner, and they have to show someone as an enemy,” Ahmed said. “The best villains are Muslims.”
While campaigning for his ruling Hindu-first party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, Home Minister Amit Shah claimed that the opposition party, the Congress Party, had allowed local Muslims in the North Indian state of Uttarakhand to block off a highway for namaz and created a massive traffic jam. But there is no evidence that any namaz occurred on a highway.
Professor Apoorvanand Jha, who teaches at Delhi University and is a political columnist, said Shah was clearly lying.
“Muslims are not idiots, that they will offer namaz in highways putting themselves in danger,” Jha said. “It's a project of daily communalization of Hindu minds.”
A series of incidents
Protests against Muslim prayers in Gurgaon surged in March 2021, led by Dinesh Bharti, who claimed to be the leader of Bharat Mata Vahini. Bharti with a handful of others succeeded in disrupting three prayer sites. The communities registered a police report against Bharti, but no arrests have been made.
Then the country went into lockdown for three months, battling a devastating second wave of COVID-19. Public prayers and gatherings of any religion were not allowed during that time.
In September 2021, as restrictions eased and public prayers began again, the conflict over allowing Muslim prayer sites resurfaced.
Jha believes the protests and threats are a way to remove Muslims from public areas.
“All the small incidents against Muslims have an accumulative effect nationally,” he said. “The culprit is the police and the administration. Muslims are not forcibly taking the land for namaz — they are (asking for) permission.
“It is a ugly thing to see. This communal politics will destroy the secular character of India.”