Reports are doing rounds about attacks on a Hindu family in the UK’s West Midlands county by Islamists. The incident was first reported early in November. The family has been attacked several times by Islamists since July this year but the local police refused to take action demanded by the complainants.
The incident was again reported this time by GB News and shared by British journalist Martin Daubney on X, formerly Twitter. Daubney’s post was reshared by another X user prompting several UK citizens to share the horrifying experiences of several Hindu families they knew living in the UK.
One such user named Bo shared an experience of their Hindu friend. The user wrote that their Hindu friend stopped wearing bindi (a Hindu symbol worn by Hindu women on the forehead between the eyebrows) owing to the hatred that she had been subjected to.
“She’d had dog poo put through her letter box, she and her husband’s cars had been keyed, they’d been spat at, and a whole host of other things,” Bo wrote on X.
Bo added, “Thinking it was locals, I was just pushing up my proverbial sleeves to start having words with people before she told me who it was and begged me not to do anything as the police didn’t seem to care. In the end, they just moved away. Beautiful family, with great kids. I think this is more common than we realise.”
Replying to this post, another user named Boudicca and Viriato wrote that their son had a Hindu friend in school and they all got on well with each other. However, the school had a majority Pakistani students and the Hindu girl “experienced abuse from some of the mums”.
“It was stuff like telling her to ‘go home’ and this was ‘their’ school. They moved away also,” Boudicca and Viriato wrote.
A user named klownShowz wrote that their friends don’t wear bindi and have been advised by the police not to draw attention by putting rangoli or flowers on the doorway in Hindu festival style.
When a user replied to Bo’s post pointing at a possible lack of support from non-Muslims, Bo replied by saying that the aggrieved couple was a quiet couple and “it was only after they left and people asked where they went, and I said, that people were furious and wished they’d known.”
X user R Hilton said that moderate Muslims also get targeted in the UK including Ahmadi Muslims.
“Ahmadi Muslim information stalls often attacked in Kingston and occasionally in Merton, where I was a Councillor. They were accused by other Muslims of not being ‘real Muslims’. Their motto “Love for All – Hatred for None” incensed the radicals,” R Hilton wrote.
Bo replied to the user saying that they have Muslim friends in Cornwall who moved to get away from the other Muslims.
An X user by the name of Becks also mentioned that her Hindu colleagues working with her in a majority-Muslim hospital pharmacy were verbally abused and bullied on a daily basis while the hospital management did not care.
The West Midlands Hindu family harassment case
In the West Midlands county of England, a Hindu couple – identified as Ramana Nagumalli, his wife Radhika Kulkarni and their 8-year-old daughter – were harassed at least five times.
The Hindu family had reported 5 instances of harassment to the West Midlands police in July this year. In one incident, the couple and their minor daughter were surrounded by a mob outside a local leisure centre.
Recently, the same men came to their house and began kicking their front door. The victims were also called ‘Kafirs’, a dehumanising term used by radical Islamists to refer to non-Muslims.
The situation has become so grim that the Indian Hindu family is now afraid to leave their house and step outside. While speaking about their ordeal, Radhika Kulkarni stated, “I was shivering outside, I was just crying. I wasn’t able to sleep. We didn’t do anything to anyone. Why is this hate there?”
But their complaint to the West Midlands police failed to elicit any meaningful action. While responding to an email by the BBC, the cops said that there was no sufficient evidence to treat the crime as ‘racially aggravated offence.’
Although the police informed that the accused men confessed to harassing the couple and their 8-year-old daughter and a ‘detailed investigation’ was underway, the criminal offence was not regarded as a ‘hate crime.’
Hindu harassment is common in the United Kingdom. And it is compounded even more by inaction from the authorities including the police. In fact, in a recent case, the harassment itself was perpetrated by a British Muslim cop.
On 19th September, a British police officer identified as Adam Ahmed used excessive force on an elderly Hindu priest of Indian origin during the Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations in Leicester in the UK.
The videos of the incident went viral on social media, where Ahmed was seen behaving rudely with the priest and the Hindu devotees who tried to stop him.
A study revealed by a UK-based think tank in April exposed that Hindu students in the country are being subjected to bullying and racial discrimination in classrooms.
The study was carried out by a research fellow named Charlotte Littlewood, who interviewed 988 Hindu parents and surveyed more than 1000 schools in the United Kingdom.
As per a report by The Telegraph, Littlewood noted that Hindu students were being bullied by their Muslim classmates and repeatedly asked to convert to Islam and in one case a female pupil had beef thrown on her.
However unfortunate and dangerous these incidents may be, there is no point expecting action from the British authorities for their sheer unwillingness and incapability to defend their own daughters from the clutches of grooming gangs largely run by Pakistani Muslims.