'Jeans jihad': How Delhi's industries minister shut down a booming, Muslim-dominated garment hub

For over two decades, the jeans stitching hub in the urban village of Khyala in West Delhi drew hundreds of Muslim tailors from Uttar Pradesh. Scores of sweatshops mushroomed here as the business grew, prompting the authorities in 2021 to recognise Khyala as an industrial area.

In time, a wholesale jeans market – among the largest in Delhi – sprang up in the neighbourhoods abutting Khyala. While Muslims dominated the business by virtue of being the first movers, Hindus and Sikhs found space in it too.

All was well, locals say, till accusations began to float around this summer that Muslims were waging a so-called jeans jihad.

According to this conspiracy theory, Muslims had been using the jeans business to change the demography of the area by forcing out Sikhs and Hindus.

Amplifying the claims (though he did not specifically use the term “jeans jihad”) was Manjinder Singh Sirsa of the Bharatiya Janata Party – the local MLA and Delhi’s minister for industries.

On social media, he has weaponised residents’ grievances against the haphazard expansion of the jeans industry using communal rhetoric that attacks its mostly Muslim workers.

Sirsa has repeatedly asserted that the Muslims from Uttar Pradesh working in the jeans business are “Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators”. Not only that, craftsmen...

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