‘Eid means mourning’: Muslims lynched in India after shock election result

The attacks expose how the election setback for PM Modi’s Hindu majoritarian party was no win for secularism, say analysts.

Aligarh, India — For Zakia Wali, Eid will never be joyous again. Instead, she says, the Muslim festival will serve as a horrific reminder of how her elder brother, Mohammad Fareed, was lynched in the town they have called home since they were born there 30 years ago.

“We were unable to give him a ghusl (full ablution), such was the condition,” recalled Wali, speaking with Al Jazeera from her home in Aligarh. “No one dared to count the injuries. Eid will only mean mourning now.”

Fareed, who made tandoori rotis – flatbreads cooked in giant clay ovens – at local eateries, was on his way back home a day after Eid when he was surrounded by a mob of Hindu hardliners.

More than a dozen men, armed with wooden sticks and iron rods, dragged the 35-year-old Fareed through the street and beat him to death as bystanders caught the horror on their phone cameras.

Aligarh, a city of 1.2 million people, is in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, which is ruled by the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, under whose decade-long rule attacks on Muslims have skyrocketed.

On June 4, after the BJP lost its national majority in stunning results from India’s mammoth national election, opposition parties portrayed the outcome as a victory for the country’s democratic and secular traditions. Many analysts suggested that the results, and Modi’s dependence on coalition partners in government, would force moderation within the Hindu hardline groups that have long inhabited the fringes of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – the BJP’s ideological mentor organisation – but gained some