The 2022 clashes between Hindus and Muslims in the city of Leicester, England, were heavily fueled by “disinformation and misinformation”, an inquiry into the violence has found.
A report by the Independent Commission of Inquiry, ‘Understanding the 2022 Violence in Leicester’, was published by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London on February 23, based on interviews with Leicester residents, witnesses of the 2022 violence, and local Hindu and Muslim religious and community groups.
The report calls on the UK government to recognise “radical and militant Hindutva”, “Hindu nationalism”, or “Hindu supremacism” as a form of extremism similar to militant political Islamism and far-right white nationalism.
“Disinformation and misinformation (‘fake news’ spread with or without the knowledge that it is inaccurate) were central accelerants of the crisis, as motivated actors promoted false narratives that blamed others for the violence,” the report said.
It found that the tensions had a wide range of complex triggers and provocations from both Hindus and Muslims. One of the factors that fanned the communal rhetoric on social media was content from coordinated accounts in India, framing the incidents in Leicester as Hindus being under attack from ‘Pakistani’ and ‘Islamist’ gangs in a way that aligns with the narrative of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), according to the report.
The 2022 Leicester unrest
Leicester is a diverse city with a massive Indian population. As per the 2021 census, 34% of the population is of Indian origin. Only 3.4% are Pakistani and 1.9% are Bangladeshi. But in terms of religion, there are more Muslims (23.5%) than Hindus (18%). Most of the Hindus and Muslims in Leicester are Gujaratis of Indian origin, according to the report.
The communal unrest in Leicester during the months of August and September 2022 involved protest marches, vandalism, physical attacks, provocative behaviour, and disinformation campaigns from both Hindus and Muslims.
“Both Hindu nationalist and political Islamist actors actively sought to inflame division for political ends,” said the report, authored by Chetan Bhatt, Vedika Puri, Syed Fahad Kamal, S Patel, Subir Sinha, Sagar Abraham-Gonsalves, Suresh Grover, Lisa Magarrell, Juan E Méndez, and Neelim Sultan.
However, the influence of both groups was uneven, it found.
“Hindu nationalist groups possessed greater resources, including the support of international media networks and backing from elements of the Indian government and many organisations in India,” said the report.
The 2022 Leicester unrest refers to a series of events during August and September 2022. The report identifies an attack on a Muslim man on May 22, which the community perceived as a hate crime and felt the police didn’t take enough action.
In August, on occasions such as the Indian Independence Day on August 15 and an India-Pakistan cricket match on August 28, loud public celebrations, mainly by Hindu youths from Daman and Diu, were seen as deliberate provocations by Muslims. The celebrations reportedly involved convoys of cars honking and waving flags outside mosques.
In early September, eggs were thrown at a Hindu house celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi, which was seen as an act of desecration. A group of Daman and Diu Hindu youths allegedly retaliated by physically assaulting a Muslim man.
As Muslim groups gathered to discuss the way forward, over a 100 Muslim youths broke away and carried out targeted attacks on Hindu individuals and properties, during which a Hindu man was stabbed. These tensions came to a head with Hindus calling for what they termed a “neighbourhood safety march” towards a Muslim area on September 17, largely organised on WhatsApp by Hindus from Daman and Diu. Some of the marchers allegedly carried knives, chanted slogans such as ‘Jai Shree Ram’, ‘Vande Mataram’, ‘Jai Bharat Mata’, and attacked a few people who appeared to be Muslim.
The report noted it was unusual to hear these chants in the public in the UK outside of Hindu nationalist circles. “While the three chants are not inherently Hindutva slogans, their grouping and the context of their use is highly significant,” the report said.
Muslims too called for counter-protests on WhatsApp, which escalated into violent clashes. As police tried to contain both groups, the Muslim group was cordoned off near a Shiva temple. One of them pulled down a saffron flag on the temple premises and set it on fire. The video was widely circulated and broadcast on Indian news media, saying a Hindu temple was vandalised and asking if Hindus were unsafe in foreign countries.
According to the inquiry, some of the Muslim marchers had tried to stop the man from pulling down the flag and chased him off. Some Muslim leaders visited the temple to apologise, offered to pay for damages and wanted to discuss ways to improve community relations, the report said.
“The events in Leicester in 2022 were unprecedented in the UK, with religious division evident across several events. No group was solely responsible for the violence: members of Hindu, especially Daman and Diu communities, and members of Muslim communities were both victims and perpetrators,” the report said.
Indian social media accounts and fear speech
The report stated that “substantial disinformation” was spread by Muslim social media influencers from outside Leicester, and both anti-Hindu and anti-Muslim abuse was seen on X, with the abuse directed at Muslims often coming from accounts in India.
“Many Hindutva narratives about Leicester were almost mirror images of the claims made by some Muslim activists…The Hindutva organisation Insight UK spread disinformation claiming that Hindus in Leicester had been victims of targeted violence by Muslims for 20 days,” the report said.
Tweets with variants of the #HindusUnderAttackInUK started cropping up in the lead up to the September 17 march. According to BBC Monitoring, which analyses global mass media, in a sample of 2 lakh tweets, over half were traced to accounts in India. Most of them appeared to be inauthentic or coordinated accounts, with signs of being recently opened with no profile picture suggesting that individuals were “deliberately using multiple accounts to push a narrative”.
But some posts were also shared by genuine users with a large following, including Hindutva activist from India Rashmi Samant.
“Hindutva narratives on social media about the Leicester events started to consolidate following the events of 5-7 September and expanded rapidly after 17 September. After 5 September, Hindutva organisations and their supporters in the UK and India became significant in shaping narratives about Leicester on social media, often under a broader RSS framing of ‘Hindus Under Attack’. These narratives had an impact on many Hindu community groups in the city and fed the polarisation that was occurring,” the report said.
Among those who made posts about the tensions framing it as “Pakistani Muslims attacking Hindus” was Sanatan Prabhat, the media wing of Sanatan Sanstha, an extremist Hindutva organisation whose members have been accused in the murders of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh, academic MM Kalburgi, CPI leader Govind Pansare, and rationalist Narendra Dabholkar.
Indian politics and other external influences
The tensions in Leicester were strongly influenced by international politics. Muslim activists drew comparisons between the situation and the condition of Muslims under the Narendra Modi government in India, while Hindutva accounts said that the situation reflected the persecution of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
However, several inflammatory events in the past, such as demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the Gujarat anti-Muslim riots in 2002, and ongoing India-Pakistan conflicts, had little influence on community relations in Leicseter, the report noted.
Both Hindu and Muslim interviewees felt that “Narendra Modi and the BJP’s governance in India has had a negative impact on community relations in the diaspora between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.”
Interviewees also mentioned local religious organisations inviting extremist Muslim or Hindu preachers, including Pakistani preacher Syed Muzaffar Shah Qadri and Sadhvi Ritambara (founder of Durga Vahini, the women's wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad), as a form of external influence on communal relations in the city.
‘Recognise radical Hindutva as a form of extremism’
The report made several recommendations for the police, government, and political parties to provide better support for integration of communities such as the Daman and Diu Hindus and others moving into Leicester.
The report called on the UK government to recognise “radical and militant Hindutva” or “Hindu nationalism” or “Hindu supremacism” as a form of extremism.
“Hindutva ideology meets the criteria in the UK Government’s 2024 definition of extremism, including Hindutva activities in the UK to ‘radicalise, indoctrinate, and recruit others to an ideology based on violence, hatred, or intolerance’, and in Hindutva attempts to glorify or excuse violence and terror in India against minorities and minority institutions,” the report said.
It also said that migrant communities, particularly those from Daman and Diu, are facing economic precarity as they have limited access to good jobs and housing. “The overcrowding and lack of domestic leisure space have spilled into public spaces, contributing to perceptions of antisocial behaviour and public drinking, and fuelling community quarrels and disputes that persisted over several years,” the report said.
Soon after the tensions, in 2022, the UK-based right-wing think tank Henry Jackson Society published a report saying there were no RSS or Hindutva elements involved in the violence, and that a Muslim individual was the main instigator of the tensions.
According to the SOAS report, Henry Jackson Society was one of the organisations that disseminated the ‘Hindus under attack’ narrative, along with Insight UK, the secretariat of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for British Hindus, and international pro-BJP media outlets.