The culture of shared belonging, for which Leicester was once famous, significantly influenced my most formative years. A highlight of my many visits to family there included the famous Diwali celebrations – the largest outside of India – which attracted the whole city, regardless of faith or culture. Hailing from the relatively more isolationist mill town communities of the north, I remember being both excited and inspired by a city so relaxed in the ownership of each other’s traditions.
As the UK’s first city where no single ethnic group would form a majority anymore, Leicester should have become a global model of multiculturalism, given this enviable tradition of cultural exchange. The question of how the UK’s largest ever riots between Hindus and Muslims could have taken place there is an urgent one.
This is precisely the question asked by the panel in the report Better Together: Understanding the 2022 Violence in Leicester, launched by SOAS this week. To better understand the context of the report I spoke with key individuals from the city, for whom the riots were felt personally. What echoed in all of my conversations was the extent to which this was sadly a foreseeable and therefore preventable event. The report describes police and senior civic leadership, including the city’s own mayor, repeatedly ignoring calls to address rising tensions, despite events of related serious violence only months before.
Samir Bhamra is a local theatre director and festival producer of mixed-faith parentage – a background that feels very ‘Leicester’ to me, or at least the version of the city I remember. He had been warning of inter-community tensions since his production of Cymbeline in 2015, which he staged to make just this point. He particularly welcomed the new report’s focus on the city’s leadership:
“Communities matter, but they cannot fix structural failure alone. Rebuilding trust requires courageous civic leadership, clear accountability and intelligent use of public investment. It also means empowering those with lived credibility and cross-community trust to lead the work on the ground. If we are serious about change, we must back the right people with the right values, give them authority, resources and long-term commitment.”
Often ‘representation’ can imply an expectation of more thoughtful leadership among multicultural communities. Yet in Leicester it seems that precisely such representational leadership failed to understand and act on these tensions soon enough. A focus instead on inclusive values must be modelled from the top.
Riaz Khan, author of Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual, was a powerful public voice of unity and moderation during the riots, and laments the breakdown in relationships in Leicester. With his own wife being from a Hindu background, he speaks of an unfortunate mistrust that has grown between the communities – exacerbated, he feels, by more recent first-generation migrants from India amplifying the politics of Hindu nationalism that may already have been simmering across the city. While political Islamism is mentioned in the report as inflaming tensions once they had begun, it suggests that Hindu nationalism played a dominant role in inspiring those tensions. Riaz welcomed suggestions of greater investment in spaces and initiatives to bring communities together more, usefully suggesting that to be effective, they need to be located in areas of the city in which both populations reside, to foster collective ownership.
I was also able to speak with a local Hindu resident, who asked not to be named. More than anything he bemoaned the police’s lack of understanding, foresight and response. Given the severe violence inflicted on a young Muslim man in May 2022, he expected the police to have been better prepared for events leading up to the riots, including skirmishes around a cricket match in August. It’s heartening then that Leicestershire police have expressed willingness to engage with the report’s recommendations, which included developing their understanding of communal dynamics within the city. The local Hindu resident also stressed the importance of engaging newer communities with values of tolerance while stemming less progressive traits. He advocated, too, for women’s voices to be engaged with more.
What the Leicester unrest made clear is the extent to which inter-communal tensions between South Asian communities, who now comprise 10% of the UK’s population, impacts on broader society. Cohesion among South Asians should matter to all of us. The suggestion of civic identity building across the city, while warmly received, does demand that prejudice imported to Britain by some immigrants also be adequately addressed.
As project manager of the British South Asian Bridgers Project, I appreciate how important understanding the drivers and responses to these disturbances is for us all. The government has also commissioned a report, which took evidence back in 2024, but it has yet to materialise and the publication date remains uncertain.
Of all the recommendations made by the SOAS report, I was most intrigued by the suggestion to create a permanent community unity forum. Such a dedicated local body could coordinate the focused work that will be required now to rebuild trust and relationships across the city’s communities. To echo Samir Bhamra, a forum of dedicated ‘bridgers’, willing and able to work for the interests of all communities, is what Leicester needs. Fortunately, the city has a deep legacy of its own from which to take inspiration.
