In Delhi’s booming cyber city, space for Muslims to pray is shrinking

Each Friday for the past two months, Muslims in this satellite city of the Indian capital have faced an anxious search for places to pray where they won’t be hounded by right-wing Hindu groups. Sravasti Dasgupta reports from Gurugram

Police stand guard to secure the site of Friday prayers amid protests by Hindu right-wing groups in Gurugram in October (AFP via Getty Images)

For the past two and a half years, Nadeem and his colleagues at a car repair shop in the Delhi satellite city of Gurugram have been offering Friday prayers at an empty plot of land, barely 500m away from their place of work.

With only 21 mosques catering to the entire, rapidly developing city of more than 1.5 million people, many working Muslims like Nadeem have had no choice but to congregate for midday Friday prayers at impromptu sites such as car parks and disused patches of grassland. The practice proved controversial among residents and right-wing Hindu organisations in particular, and in 2018 the authorities restricted these prayers to just 37 designated open-air locations across Gurugram.

Yet now those spots are also under threat, and at the end of October the plot used by Nadeem and his colleagues became the latest site to be targeted for a protest by members of right-wing groups.