How religious clashes came to Leicester
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2022
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Leicester has always been held up as a beacon of multicultural Britain. But for more than two weeks, the city has witnessed religious clashes between young men from the Hindu and Muslim communities. The violence flared up after a cricket match, but is there more to this story than meets the eye? Has fake news stoked tensions? And could the Hindu nationalist ideology of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have had an influence?
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Guests:
- Fiona Hamilton, Crime and Security Editor, The Times.
- Barnie Choudhury, Editor-at-large, Eastern Eye newspaper.
Host: Manveen Rana.
Clips: Leicestershire Police, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, One India News, Reuters, DW News, NDTV.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Lester has always been held up as a beacon of multi-cultural Britain. |
| 0:10.1 | It's a city where people who speak over 70 different languages, from different faiths |
| 0:15.4 | and different cultures live and thrive side by side. |
| 0:20.6 | You would say, salam alaykum to Muslims and they would return with Namaste or Namashkar, |
| 0:27.4 | which are the Hindu traditions to say hello to you. |
| 0:30.6 | If it were Eid as a Hindu we would break fast with them and if it were Devali they would |
| 0:35.1 | come to our place and celebrate. |
| 0:40.9 | But over the last few weeks something has gone very wrong. |
| 0:45.4 | We've had numerous reports of an outbreak of disorder in parts of the East Lester area |
| 0:51.0 | of the city. |
| 0:52.0 | We have got officers there, we are taking control of that situation. |
| 0:56.3 | Please do not get involved, we are calling for help. |
| 1:01.2 | Young men from the Hindu and Muslim communities have been clashing on the streets. |
| 1:07.1 | The violence flaring up after an international cricket match. |
| 1:12.1 | But is there more to this story than meets the eye? |
| 1:15.9 | I've had WhatsApp messages saying that some Muslims were deliberately targeting Hindu |
| 1:23.3 | areas or that some Hindus were grooming Muslim girls. |
| 1:27.9 | Now we have no proof for that but because of social media, because of things like WhatsApp, |
| 1:34.4 | fake news gets around. |
| 1:36.8 | There was a BBC analysis of about 200,000 English language tweets about the disorder and |
| 1:43.9 | half of them the BBC geo-located to India. |
| 1:49.4 | The fake news and online disinformation stoked the tensions in Lester and what's caused |
... |
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