It was early evening, and as the men passed rows of terrace houses, redbrick warehouses and the Piccadilly Cinemas, which was advertising a Hindi-language epic set during the British Raj, they chanted “Jai Shree Ram” (“Victory to Lord Rama”). This phrase has long been an innocuous declaration of religious faith, but in recent decades, it has become associated with the politics of Hindu nationalism in India, where militants use it as a rallying cry in campaigns of intimidation and violence against minorities, particularly Muslims. The men also shouted other slogans that have become associated with the Hindu right: “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” (“Victory to Mother India”) and “Vande Mataram” (“Praise Mother [India]”).
As word spread on WhatsApp, counter-demonstrations of mainly Muslim men soon formed. Many local police officers had been seconded to London for the state funeral, but those that remained were hastily scrambled to try to keep the crowds apart. One man, filming on his phone, appealed to a police officer to make arrests. “I don’t know what they’re saying,” the officer admitted. “The problem is if we arrest one person, the whole fu
cking lot go up.”
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About 370,000 people live in Leicester; according to data gathered in the 2021 census, 23.5% are Muslim and 17.9% are Hindu, and the majority of both groups have Indian heritage. With sizable Somali and eastern European populations, the city is what sociologists call “super-diverse”. After the 2021 census, Leicester became, alongside Birmingham, one of the first British cities to have a non-white majority. But while white racist politics have been a feature of Leicester’s history – from the National Front picking up thousands of votes in the 1970s to the English Defence League marching on the city in 2010 – this kind of large-scale violent enmity between Hindus and Muslims was new. “It’s not something we have ever seen on the streets of Leicester,” Sharmen Rahman, a former councillor, told me last June.
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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 came after the second world war. It was a relatively small community – less than 5,000 by 1961 – but it established itself socially and culturally. The major migration wave came in the late 60s and 70s and largely comprised Asian “twice migrants” – those who had settled in countries such as Kenya and Uganda under the auspices of British colonialism. When those countries gained independence and pursued “Africanisation” policies, many Asians left. In the case of Uganda, they were expelled with 90 days’ notice.
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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 disturb the stereotypical image of Hindus in Britain as well-off professionals. Many work in Leicester’s garment sector or in warehouse jobs. (One of the city’s biggest employers is a company called Samworth Brothers, where staff and agency workers make salads and pastries for high-street brands.) It is not unusual for multiple families to live under one roof. Perhaps because of their hardship, Daman and Diu people are also culturally self-confident: they celebrate their Hinduism proudly. In the area around Green Lane Road, you can often tell which houses they live in because of the religious iconography in the windows and doors. (Crucifixes and verses from the Qur’an also adorn some house fronts.)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/08/unrest-leicester-muslim-hindu-re...Etc, etc, etc.
Diversity is their weakness. Tsk, tsk
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