Lucknow, India - Two people were killed and several injured on Thursday when groups of Hindus and Muslims clashed over prayers at a Hindu temple, officials said.
The rioting erupted in a crowded neighbourhood of Aligarh town in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh after Muslims objected to the use of loudspeakers overnight by Hindus, who were celebrating the birthday of the Hindu god-king, Rama.
“Additional police, including riot police, have been deployed in affected areas and a curfew has been imposed,” said S.K. Aggarwal, the principal home secretary for Uttar Pradesh.
Knives, bricks and bamboo sticks were used in the fighting, and police reported gunshots being fired. Eight of the injured were in a critical condition, officials said.
Aligarh, which has a large Muslim population, has seen frequent clashes between Hindus and Muslims in the past.
India’s most-populous Uttar Pradesh state, which has a 17 per cent Muslim minority, has a history of communal violence.
Eighteen people were killed and dozens were injured last month by bomb blasts, carried out by Islamic militants, in Uttar Pradesh’s holy Hindu town of Varanasi.
Though communal tensions in India have eased in the past two years, violence flares easily in crowded towns of the north and the west where the country’s Hindu majority and Muslim minority live side by side.
Rights groups say that more than 2,500 people, mainly Muslims, were hacked and burned to death in the western state of Gujarat in 2002 after 59 Hindu pilgrims and activists were burnt to death in a train. The blaze was at first blamed on a Muslim mob but subsequently declared an accident by a special inquiry.