Kadamtala (Tripura), India – The last thing Shaheen Ahmed, 38, remembers about her brother Alfeshani Ahmed was a frantic call she made to him amid gunfire and screams.
At around 9 pm on October 6, Alfeshani, a 36-year-old owner of a smartphone and electronic goods shop, had quickly closed his shop in Kadamtala market and left to go back to his home in Jher Jheri, a Muslim-dominated village three kilometers away. . (about 2 miles) away in North Tripura, a district in northeastern India.
The mob was rioting in the market and Ahmed knew that his shop would not be spared. “Therefore, he left the shop carrying only the account book of his shop, which contained all his financial transactions and records,” Ahmed said.
Earlier in the early hours of the day, tensions had flared up between local Hindus and Muslims in the area when the Muslim driver of a car refused to give membership to a local Hindu club for Durga Puja, a major Hindu festival. The driver and a passenger, both Muslims, were also allegedly attacked by club members.
Kadamtala subdivision, which also includes Bazaar, has a mixed population of Hindus and Muslims, with more than 64 percent of the population being Hindus and about 35 percent being Muslims. Muslims, also the state’s largest minority group, constitute about 9 percent of Tripura’s population of 36 lakh.
Muslims in Kadamtala and surrounding areas of Hindu-majority North Tripura have traditionally paid subscriptions for Durga Puja celebrations as a sign of harmony between Hindus and Muslims. State Chief Minister Manik Saha had already warned groups against forcibly demanding membership fees for Durga Puja.
However, the situation deteriorated by the evening of 6 October, as Hindu and Muslim groups clashed, leading to heavy deployment of security personnel. According to him, the police lathi-charged the crowd and opened fire. reports,
Seventeen people, mostly policemen, were injured and one person died in the communal clashes.
It was Alfeshani. “He was talking on the phone with me when a bullet hit his head,” Alfashani’s brother Shaheen Ahmed told Al Jazeera.
However, Bhanupada Chakraborty, who was the Superintendent of Police of North Tripura district at the time, said that the police did not target anyone specifically, and the cause of Alfeshani’s death was “under investigation”.
However, his family disputes the police version. “The police shot him in the head,” Alfeshani’s mother Alifzan Begum said, crying. “The fire in my heart will never go out. It was a murder.”
trigger
Earlier in the day, a delegation of Muslims asked the local police to arrest those responsible for the alleged attack on the Muslim driver and passenger. In response, Kadamtala police also detained two people in connection with the alleged attack on the Muslim driver and the female passenger. He was detained after protests by local Muslims.
But a person who was part of the Muslim delegation, requesting anonymity, said tensions escalated after another member of the Durga Puja organizing club made “provocative remarks” about the Prophet Muhammad on Facebook. Al Jazeera can independently verify the comments.
The angry Muslim group searched for the youth in a Hindu dominated area. “They pelted stones and broke doors and windows, creating panic among the Hindus and asked the Hindu boy to hand them over,” Bibhu Debnath, secretary of the Kadamtala Market Association, told Al Jazeera.
This angered the Hindus. Groups linked to the Hindu majoritarian Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – the ideological source of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which also rules Tripura – vandalized some Muslim shops in Kadamtala market.
As the back-and-forth between the two groups intensified, Alfashani tried to flee.
he could not.
![Suhail Khan's shop in Kadamtala market was set on fire by a Hindu mob on October 7. [Arshad Ahmed_Al Jazeera] (2)-1733395543](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Suhail-Khans-shop-in-the-Kadamtala-market-was-torched-by-a-Hindu-mob-on-7-October-Arshad-Ahmed_Al-Jazeera-2-1733395543.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C578)
‘Burned selectively’
On the morning of October 8, Suhail Ahmed Khan, 40, finally reached his shop in Kadamtala market. It was five minutes from home, but it took two days before it was safe for him to go there because of the violence.
A day earlier on October 7, local Hindus and a mob from outside Kadamtala, allegedly belonging to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal – an RSS-affiliated group – had gathered on the outskirts of the market. They then moved towards the market, “burning houses and looting”, said Hira Lal Nath, a local political leader from the opposition Congress party. RSS publicity in-charge in Tripura Tapas Roy has denied these allegations.
Khan’s shop was burnt to ashes. A shop selling smartphones and other electronic gadgets was also looted in Kadamtala market.
This was a shop in which Khan had invested his life’s savings. “More than Rs 57 lakh [$67,550] Was burnt in the flames,” Khan said, struggling to speak. “With such loss my life became death.”
“It was collective punishment,” Khan said, struggling to speak. “They have ruined us mentally and financially.”
The Kadamtala Jama Masjid, right in the middle of the Kadamtala market, was also set on fire by a mob on the same day on 7 October. “They burned all the religious books,” Abdul Motin, an adviser to the Kadamtala Jama Masjid committee, told Al Jazeera. ,
On the outskirts of the market in Saraspur neighbourhood, Islam Uddin, in his 40s, is rebuilding his burnt house. His house was one of 10 Muslim-owned residences, located in a neighborhood with a large Hindu population, that were set on fire by a mob on 7 October, the same day.
“My family and I had to flee to save our lives,” he said.
His neighbour, Atrun Nessa, whose house was burnt down, is now surviving on donations from local NGOs. Her family’s only source of income – an e-rickshaw driven by her husband Siraj Uddin – was burnt by the Hindu mob.
“It was the only way for us to manage a morsel,” Nessa, 47, told Al Jazeera, crying. “What life are we living now?”
Several witnesses, requesting anonymity, claimed that the police stood as “spectators” when the angry Hindu mob carried out the violence on October 7.
Islam Uddin, a local MLA from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), claimed that the police allowed the arson. “If [police] If they wanted, they could have stopped the Hindu mob,” he said, adding, “It all seemed as if they were choosing a side.”
Opposition Congress Party MLA Sudip Roy Barman said the violence in Kadamtala was “state sponsored” by the BJP. “BJP wanted to instigate Muslims.”
When contacted for comment, Chakraborty, then North Tripura Superintendent of Police, told Al Jazeera: “I am not the right person to talk to the press.”
Al Jazeera’s calls to Tripura police chief Amitabh Ranjan were not answered. Al Jazeera has also sent a detailed questionnaire to his office but has not yet received a response. However, he has earlier rejected allegations of police inaction during the violence.
‘Muslims are living in fear’
The clashes in Kadamtala are the latest example of inter-religious violence in Tripura in recent months, after repeated tensions erupted in August and October over allegations that Muslims deified Hindu deities. In retaliation, mosques were attacked and in some cases, Muslim houses were burned.
For Sultan Ahmed, a Tripura-based activist and national secretary of the Muslim student organization Students Islamic Organization of India, these latest attacks bring back memories of the devastating riots that swept across large parts of the state in 2021.
“Muslims in Tripura are still living in fear of that incident,” Ahmed said.
Large Hindu mobs linked to far-right groups attacked Muslim homes and mosques in several districts of the state, especially in North Tripura, which shares a 96 km-long (60 mi) border with Bangladesh.
The attacks were in response to Muslim mobs in Bangladesh who attacked Hindu minorities there after a Quran was found on the knee of a Hindu deity during Durga Puja celebrations.
“Since then, any attack on Hindus in Bangladesh puts Muslims living in North Tripura in danger,” Ahmed said.
‘Hindus have changed’
Tripura has long seen ethnic violence between the state’s tribal communities and Bengalis. However, this peaceful hill state does not have a history of clashes on religious grounds between Hindus and Muslims.
Till Modi’s BJP came to power in 2018.
While India’s Home Ministry has stopped publishing statistics on inter-religious violence, available data from the National Crime Records Bureau on statewide riots from 2016 to 2020 shows that only two cases of communal violence were recorded in Tripura, And that too was in 2019.
However, Uddin, a Communist Party of India (Marxist) MLA, said the number has risen sharply since 2018 in about a dozen cases in which Hindu groups tried to “incite communal sentiments”.
These incidents include right-wing organizations attacking rubber plantations owned by Muslims in the state and claiming that an ancient mosque is a temple.
The incidents of lynching of Muslim men by Hindu mobs have also increased.
Subrata Chakraborty, BJP spokesperson in Tripura, told Al Jazeera that “there is nothing like that [group] Privilege is available under the present government”.
Chakraborty said, “This government is a proactive government and a pro-development government.”
Meanwhile, Kadamtala is under stress. Khan, whose shop was set on fire by the Hindu mob, said, “Muslims, who constitute 70 per cent of the customers in the market, no longer want to buy anything from the Hindu shop.” “The harmony that was there will take years to return, or perhaps never.”
For Abdul Haq, a former member of the BJP’s minority wing in Kadamtala, the recent violence was symbolic of a broader change.
“Earlier, during Hindu festivals, they would adjust the loudspeakers in such a way that it would not cause trouble to Muslims, but now, they turn up the loudspeakers and play provocative songs,” he said.
“Hindus here have changed.”
