Repeated incidents of Muslims being humiliated and attacked by Hindu right-wing members have once again come under the spotlight, as a disturbing video showing pilgrims returning from Umrah being coerced into removing their caps, chanting “Jai Shri Ram,” and bowing before a temple in Delhi’s Yamuna Bazaar, was widely shared on social media and is being construed as encouragement for like-minded groups to humiliate Muslims in public.
The widely circulated clip, which has heightened concerns over increasing communal tensions in the national capital, shows elderly Muslim men being stripped of their prayer caps, forced into the temple precincts, and made to perform reverential acts under pressure while being taunted by locals.
The video, as reported by Zee Salaam TV, identifies one of the accused as Siddharth Sharma, who appears visibly inebriated and can be heard accusing the pilgrims of urinating in the vicinity, while asserting that “This is our Hindu temple.”
The confrontation reportedly began when the pilgrims, who had alighted from a minibus for a meal near the temple, were confronted by a group of local men, and Sharma, among others, is seen removing their caps and marching them into the temple while chanting “Jai Shri Ram.”
The accused men can also be heard warning each other not to let the pilgrims touch the temple while ordering them to prostrate fully on the temple floor, even as the elderly victims tried to clarify that they were travelling from Arab and not from Saharanpur, as claimed by their tormentors.
Sharma’s allegations of the pilgrims urinating in the area remain unverified and appear to be disputed by the victims themselves, yet the aggressive insistence by the attackers reflects a pattern of hostility that is increasingly becoming visible in public spaces in the capital. In the video, one elderly pilgrim can be heard threatening to involve the police, but the intimidation continued until the group complied with the forced gestures of reverence.
Soon after the clip gained traction online, a second video surfaced showing Sharma issuing an apology in which he described the incident as something that had taken place 10–12 days earlier and extended regret to his “Muslim brothers,” although the apology has done little to quell outrage.
Human rights groups have condemned the humiliation of the pilgrims and called upon Delhi Police to take action, yet at the time of writing, no case had been registered despite the footage being brought to the attention of the authorities.
The incident comes in the backdrop of other Islamophobic acts recently reported from the capital, including threats faced by a Muslim shopkeeper in Sagarpur for displaying his name on his shop board and the eviction of a Muslim couple allegedly over their caste identity.