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So I wanted to talk a little bit about what's been going on in Leicester in the UK in recent weeks. TL;DR: Sectarian violence imported from the Indian subcontinent bubbles over into a UK city that has previously been deemed an example of "good" diversity, with the potential for much scarier and wider violence in larger cities if the police/community don't get it under control.
I'll start by saying that one of the central aspects of the South Asian religious squabbles we've seen in recent years has been misinformation and biased reporting agitating and stoking tensions. This time it isn't any different, and that makes it difficult to decipher exact timelines. I'll be going off what I've seen from "reputable reporters" in the UK, but take everything with a slight pinch of salt.
I'll do a brief timeline of events, then some background on Leicester and South Asian community dynamics in the UK, and then some brief thoughts- I wanted this post mostly to be informative to a non-British audience, rather than me spouting polemical.
Quick important context: Leicester is a mid-sized British City (approx. 370k 2021 pop.) in the East Midlands. It has historically had a very large South Asian (or just Asian in the UK) population, which until recently was nearly entirely Indian (i.e. Hindu or Sikh). In the 2011 census this stood at 93k Indians, or 28% (almost certainly larger now). In the last 30 years or so the Muslim (Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Middle Eastern) population has grown- very difficult to get exact numbers but maybe up to 20% of the population (in 1991 probably about 1%). More on this later.
So on the 28th August India played Pakistan in a Cricket match. This was what you might call a big deal- there's obviously a massive rivalry which gets carried into Cricket, both countries' national sport. After the match, groups of fans of both countries gathered in the city centre, in what seemed to me a mirror image of the post-match behaviour we saw in London after the Euro 2020 football final- crowd dynamics, young amped up men, hooliganism etc. There were reports of some scuffles, apparently Indian fans chanted "Death to Pakistan", there were anti-Muslim slogans, and a (probably Sikh) man was attacked.
This died down relatively quickly, but within a few days, Hindus began sharing videos on WhatsApp of gangs of men attacking property and people in Hindu areas of the city. Some flags were taken down (as far as I can tell, orange Hindutva/BJP-type flags). Videos of some of the men having knives (all too common in the UK now) also circulated. The implication was this was Muslim men attacking the Hindu community.
These messages then started spreading on the ubiquitous WhatsApp groups that the diaspora communities use. The line seemed to be that Muslim gangs were targeting Hindu households, especially those with religious symbols. This was possibly retaliation for or simply escalation of the behaviour seen on the 28th August. Hindus then started saying they needed to gather and protect those households and areas under attack, and at the weekend groups of Hindu men started to mobilise and appeared on the streets in the areas that had been targeted.
That began a tit-for-tat retaliation/escalation, where Muslim activists (usually social media "influencers", young "community leaders", 99% men) turned up on the streets to film the large gatherings of masked up Hindu "protectors", to then post the videos online for a) clout and b) to get Muslims to mobilise. There are lots of videos of Hindu groups chanting nationalist slogans like "Jai Shree Ram" on the streets, usually with masks, hoods etc. Police are struggling to manage the situation, and are using tried and tested crowd control tactics which are more often used for groups of football fans (the similarity is striking). This doesn't involve much actual intervention however to avoid violence and try and keep the group calm.
Muslim groups are then filmed protesting the Hindu crowd's actions (and police inaction), which moves on to causing trouble by removing flags outside Hindu temples. Flag burning videos also circulate (veracity uncertain). All this serves to just inflame Hindus in the UK (WhatsApp again...), but also in India. The right-wing strongly pro-BJP media in India latches on to these tit-for-tat exchanges where it is framed as Hindus being attacked by Muslims- to the extent that the Indian GOVERNMENT has called on the UK to sort it out and stop the "persecution".
This is all inflamed by the Muslim activists/social media influencers coming in and making soap-box speeches, of a radical Islamist, anti-Hindu nature. Again, pretty much everyone involved in this is young-ish men.
This weekend (17th September) the WhatsApp disinformation machine went into overdrive, with claims of Mosques/Temples being attacked/burned (not true as far as I can tell). Mobs are now in the low hundreds rather than the roaming gangs that we saw previously. Police struggled to contain it and made a series of arrests (around 50 in total). Whilst I've been writing this, a man has been jailed for 10 months (which is a very fast turn around) for possession of an offensive weapon. Hopefully this is a sign of the authorities cracking down in order to prevent this spiralling further- we saw similar tactics after the 2011 London riots.
So that's the timeline up to today. The risk is that this is not contained within Leicester, and escalates to places like Birmingham or London, where there are both large numbers of Muslims and large numbers of Hindus. In one sense it has already escalated past Leicester, thanks to the wonders of modern media, and there have definitely been people coming in from nearby Midlands cities (Birmingham/Nottingham) to "protect" their community (mostly Muslims from what I can tell).
Some further demographic context is probably useful at this point. In 2011 there were roughly 800,000 Hindus in England (relevant subpart of UK), 420,000 Sikhs, and 2,700,000 Muslims. Most of the Muslims in the UK are Pakistani/Bangladeshi, with more recent arrivals from MENA.
What makes Leicester unique is that it is the only major city in England which has more Hindus than Muslims. The Hindu population of the UK is concentrated in north-west London (to be fair the Boroughs of Brent and Harrow are 100k strong in their own right, and are both Hindu>Muslim) and in Leicester. Other centres of the Asian population in the UK (East London, Birmingham, Bradford, South Yorkshire, Lancashire) are very much Muslim (i.e. Pakistani or Bengali) rather than Hindu.
As I said earlier, Leicester is rapidly becoming a city with large Hindu AND Muslim components, rather than a Hindu centre. Leicester also has a large black British population (~7%). Leicester has been one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the UK for a while now, and was also upheld as an example of "good community relations". However, these community relations were between white Brits/Eastern Europeans/Indians/blacks until fairly recently. The massive increase in the Muslim population of the city has changed this balance, and introduced a usually unseen (in the UK) dynamic of minority v minority, rather than the usual ethnic conflict (majority v minority).
The Muslim population in the UK is growing rapidly, partially due to immigration, but predominantly due to birth rates. Indians (often East African Asians in the UK) have usually been a) wealthier and b) more assimilated than the larger Muslim population. They also have birth rates which are closer to the national average.
I'm not going to go into depth on the rise of Hindu nationalism, but suffice to say that it has made it over into the UK via WhatsApp, and is one of the larger factors behind the escalation. It is easy to see a picture here of the only "Hindu" city in the UK quickly becoming more and more Muslim, with presumably an inevitable overtaking in the near future, and rising anti-Muslim sentiment amongst Indians (including the diaspora) and how that may result in what we're seeing happen on the streets.
This post has got too long so I will stop here, but there are some really interesting and complex dynamics at work on top of this core story. The key ones are in my view:
-Importation of South Asian sectarianism into Britain
-Relative population growth rates and migration
-Rise in Hindu nationalism/RSS/Hindutva
But there are also a ton of other stories going on- some unique to this, some that have been bubbling away for a while in the UK:
-WhatsApp and instant communication and their role in spreading misinformation/radicalisation
-Media bias (lack of reporting due to the Queen's funeral)
-Stoking of tension by online influencers for "clout"
-Knife crime/gang violence imported from London, often via internet culture and music
-Mob mentality/masculinity, and the similarities with football hooliganism
-Islamic extremism, or at the very least anti-integration/orthodoxy
-Inability of the police to manage crowds (yet again)
-Wariness around ethnic minority/sectarian issues from the authorities.
Hope this was of some interest- as I said, be careful of sources if you want to read more into this- twitter is a good place to look to see real reactions from those involved and how both sides are adamant that the other side is 100% at fault and it is clearly an anti-X attitude.
No doubt to many people these events will serve as further proof of the failure of Britain to integrate South Asians, yet if anything the reactions I've seen to them have bolstered rather than eroded my faith in multiculturalism. It's quite clear that many Leicester residents, both Hindu and Muslim, have strongly condemned the disorder and violence. Many are self-evidently proud of their city, and proud to be British Asians. They appear to deeply resent the fact that due to the actions of a proportionally small number of miscreants, very many of whom seem to be neither Leicestrian nor British, a negative light is being cast on their communities—for they understand that when it comes to brown people, many white Britons are not inclined to draw distinction between local and foreigner.
For those proud Britons, born and bred here, who have always struggled for acceptance because of their ethnicity, their religion, and the colour of their skin—I feel profound sympathy. When an Old Firm derby descends into carnage it is viewed with nothing more than muted disapproval, but when sectarianism involves South Asians it is framed as tribal warfare†. Let me be perfectly clear: I wish that the offenders be dealt with—yet I hope also that all those here who consider themselves to have a more clear-eyed understanding of masculinity than the progressive orthodoxy can recognise that the anger of listless young men who seek a flag to rally around is a trait shared by every swathe of humanity that lives under modernity.
† A proposal for reconcilliation in Leicester: a flag with three coloured stripes, one orange representing Hindus, one green representing Muslims, and one white in the middle representing lasting peace. Stop me if you've heard this one before...
Sure, I broadly agree. I hope my post didn't give the impression that this was somehow the entire Muslim and Hindu male population fighting it out- the vast majority have been completely reasonable if not actively helpful in trying to calm it down.
I think you're right about the masculine flag stuff as well, but worth noting that for the Muslim sections it is still very much a flag of faith. In fact I'll be very interested to see the census 2021 results and whether the Muslim population in Leicester is majority Pakistani or more mixed as it was in 2011 (Arabs/Afghan etc etc).
On the other hand, the old firm comparisons are slightly unhelpful - we're talking about the people of 2 nuclear armed states who've commited de facto genocide against each other, plus their allies who belong to a faith of billions, not interdoctrinal differences between a few million. Slightly exaggerated but I do genuinely think the dividing lines are much deeper than the Catholic/Prot gap (not to say the latter wasn't deeply felt).
And while you are correct that there is always the possibility of orientalist hypocrisy in these matters, one can't help but point out that these are non-indigenous, if not non-British (1st gen, unassimilated etc) people squabbling rather than those with roots of thousands of years.
Besides the partition riots, there was also the 1971 genocide which came back to spotlight among Hindu Nationalists following the Russian invasion. They turned Russophilic all of a sudden.
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