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Video Editor: Rajbir Singh
Camera: Shiv Kumar Maurya
"Is this not our country? Do we not have freedom ?" asks a visibly enraged Altaf Ahmad, a 45-year-old resident of Gurugram. He is watching a short clip of the Jumma Namaz being offered at a open site in the city, and is disgusted by how it's interrupted by members of the Hindu right-wing outfits.
Ahmad, co-founder of Gurgaon Nagrik Ekta Manch, says that he is saddened to see how Friday prayers, which he says are an integral part of Islam, are being attacked repeatedly. Hindu right-wing groups have been demanding that Namaz in the open be stopped since 2018. These objections have only grown louder since September 2021.
Ahmad explains that a majority of those who offer Namaz in the city are migrant factory workers, who often give-up their lunch, just to offer Friday prayers at open sites in the absence of close-by mosques.
Ahmad had originally planned to visit an open Namaz site in sector 44 but as news of disruptions by right wing groups poured in, he decided to go to the Eidgah instead.
Aware of his privilege, Ahmad says that while he can take out time and drive to a mosque a bit far away, many migrant Muslims in Gurugram's industrial sectors don't have that option.
Every time Ahmad steps out to offer namaz, a sense of fear takes over his wife Henna. Fearing that something may go wrong, she makes a note of the mosque her husband is going to and where he would go next.
She recalls an incident when her younger daughter came back home from school, in tears.
While Henna doesn't blame the children, she does find fault in the larger media narrative which she feels has increasingly become Islamophobic. Ahmad believes the solution lies in a united resistance to such disruptions.
"If our Hindu, Sikh, and Christian brothers form a human chain, then let them come and bother us," he adds.
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