A report on the 2022 communal unrest in Leicester, in the United Kingdom, has concluded that although the initial catalytic episode lay in the May assault on a young Muslim man, followed by a corrosive spiral of reprisal and recrimination, the subsequent mobilisation that convulsed the city did not arise in a vacuum but was profoundly conditioned by Hindutva-inflected narratives and the transnational circulation of diasporic ideological currents.
Chants such as Vande Mataram, Jai Shree Ram and Bharat Mata Ki Jai reverberated through Muslim residential quarters amid orchestrated motorcades and processions, entrenching an assertive majoritarian idiom within an already combustible civic atmosphere and widening a latent communal fissure into open and disfiguring street confrontation.
The report, titled Better Together: Understanding the 2022 Violence in Leicester, and authored by a panel including Chetan Bhatt and Juan E. Méndez among others, delineates a concatenation of communal flashpoints that predated the widely publicised unrest following India’s victory over Pakistan in the Asia Cup match held in Dubai on August 28, 2022.
According to the inquiry, the violent assault on May 22, 2022, against an 18-year-old Muslim man near Uppingham Road, allegedly by a group demanding he disclose his religious identity, constituted the principal catalytic episode, and the absence of prosecutions engendered a sedimentation of grievance and alienation within segments of the Muslim populace.
The report documents that, even before the cricket match, gatherings of Hindu youths, largely from the Daman and Diu regional diaspora, had assembled outside mosques and orchestrated vehicular convoys across Belgrave and Highfields, especially on India’s Independence Day and after the August 28 fixture, conduct that several Muslim residents construed as calculated provocation rather than spontaneous jubilation.
As India’s triumph ignited exuberant celebrations, the streets of Leicester witnessed escalating triumphalism, with chants of Bharat Mata Ki Jai and Pakistan Murdabad resounding amid car processions, and the communal tenor of the slogans was accentuated by the pejorative conflation of local Muslims with “Pakistanis,” notwithstanding the predominantly Indian origin of South Asian Muslims in the city.
The desecration of a Hindu household during Ganesh Chaturthi, when eggs were hurled at a residence, further inflamed sensibilities, and retaliatory violence by Hindu youths culminated in the brutal assault of a Muslim man in the early hours of September 5, whose injuries necessitated hospitalisation and intensified collective apprehension.
In response, sizeable Muslim gatherings convened outside the Jame’ Masjid between September 5 and 7 with the declared intention of deliberating peaceful recourse, yet a coterie of incited youths splintered from the assembly and perpetrated attacks on Hindu individuals and properties in North Evington, during which a Hindu man was stabbed, thereby deepening reciprocal recrimination.
Police intervention, characterised by what the report describes as intelligence lacunae and operational inconsistency, elicited censure from both constituencies, as Muslims decried heavy-handed dispersals while Hindus lamented dilatory protection when their homes were besieged.
The September 17 “Hindu solidarity march,” organised through encrypted messaging platforms and traversing predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods such as Green Lane Road, is characterised in the report as an aggressive and intimidating demonstration, with masked participants—some allegedly bearing knives—invoking chants associated with Hindu nationalism in India.
While the slogans themselves are not inherently extremist, the inquiry concludes that their concatenated deployment within a charged diasporic milieu signified the permeation of Hindutva narratives, which the report describes as internationally coordinated and politically amplified by organisations including Insight UK and the Henry Jackson Society, thereby reframing local disorder as a unidirectional assault on Hindus.
Although the report acknowledges the presence of limited political Islamist rhetoric among a small cohort of actors, it asserts that Hindutva ideology exercised a more expansive and orchestrated influence, and it recommends that militant Hindu nationalism be recognised within the United Kingdom’s extremism framework alongside other supremacist doctrines, while urging a historic conclave between Leicester’s Hindu and Muslim leaders to rehabilitate fractured civic concord.