Harun Nasrullah
India’s largest Muslim NGO has announced on October 30, it will repair mosques and houses of Muslims targeted by Hindu rioters in the north-eastern state of Tripura ten days earlier.
Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind sent a fact-finding team led by General Secretary, Moulana Hakimuddin Qasmi, to different areas of the state to assess the anti-Muslim riots, which gripped Tripura in the third week of October.
The Association for Protection of Civil Rights said there have been at least 27 confirmed incidents of far-right Hindu mobs attacking mosques, houses, and individuals in Muslim areas of the state.
Several photos and videos on social media show the Hindutva mobs wearing saffron cloths and armed with swords chanting anti-Muslim slogans and calling for violence in the area. The rhetoric forced several Muslim residents to flee from their houses.
The rights group said various right-wing groups carried out the attacks, including the Vishva Hindu Parishad that ostensibly gathered to protest anti-Hindu violence in Bangladesh.
‘It is to be noted that in SepahiJala (district), a place at a distance of only 30 kilometres (19 miles) from Agartala, the capital of Tripura, rioters ransacked the mosques and prevented Muslims for the last several days to offer prayers there,’ Jamiat said in a statement
The delegation also visited riot-affected areas and targeted mosques.
It said that the group is seeking permission from the police to visit the most affected parts of the region. “The Jamiat has decided to repair the affected mosques and rehabilitate houses that were ransacked,” said the Muslim group.
Jamiat’s President Maulana Mahmood Madani noted that no action has been taken by the Government against those who “committed the sacrilege of (the Muslim) Prophet Muhammad.”
While many groups have said that mosques have been attacked, the state police, however, denied that any “mosque was burned down.”
“It is absolutely under control and everything is normal on the ground,” Deputy Inspector General of Police (Northern range) Lalhminga Darlong said. He said “very minor” incidents and things “have been exaggerated.”
Muslims make up less than 9 percent of Tripura’s 4.2 million population.
“Though a majority of Tripura’s population is Hindu refugees from what is now Bangladesh, there has never been any attacks against Muslims here after previous religious disturbances in the neighbouring country,” said Bikach Choudhury, a Tripura-based writer.
Opposition parties are blaming the attacks on Muslims on “politically motivated fringe elements” close to the BJP.
Sushmita Dev, an MP from the regional Trinamul Congress party, said that the BJP was trying to use the recent violence in Bangladesh to “polarise” the voters ahead of the municipal elections in the state in November.
