SHAFAQNA- India’s Muslims marked Eid Al-Fitr on Tuesday (03 May 2022) by offering prayers outside mosques, with the celebrations this year amid attacks against the religious minority during Ramadhan.
“We will not have the same kind of festivity” this year, said Mohammad Habeeb ur Rehman, a civil engineer in India’s financial capital, Mumbai. “This is the most painful Eid with the worst memories for Indian Muslims.”
Anti-Muslim sentiment and attacks have surged across the country in the last month, including stone throwing between Hindu and Muslim groups during religious processions and subsequent demolitions by authorities of a number of properties belonging mostly to Muslims.
The community, which makes up 14% of India’s 1.4 billion population, is reeling from vilification by hard-line Hindu nationalists who have long espoused an anti-Muslim stance. Some leaders of India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party have tacitly supported the violence, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi has so far been silent about it.
Source: abcnews