Her husband was a victim of anti-Muslim hate in India. A research group warns it's on the rise

As she scrolled through countless wedding photos on her phone, looking at the smiling face of her husband who was killed last September in communal clashes, Ayesha Hasan Shikalgar couldn't help but smile back at him through her pain. 

"He was always joking and laughing," said Ayesha, 30. "Now, the void in my life can never be filled." 

It started as a normal Sunday, she said, with the young couple hosting a housewarming party that day to celebrate the renovations they had done in preparation for the birth of their first child. In the evening, her husband, Nurul Hasan Shikalgar, went to the local mosque for prayer, as he always did. 

He never came home. 

"The wound is so deep and the trauma is so strong," Ayesha said, in an interview several months after her husband's death. "People say time heals all wounds, but for me, it's the opposite. It keeps getting worse." 

Locals in Pusesavali, a village in the western Indian state of Maharashtra's Satara district, said the violence erupted late that evening, when an angry Hindu mob burst through the streets of the town, eventually entering the mosque, brandishing metal rods and sticks. 

"They were throwing stones at our door," said local shopkeeper Shakira Bagwan, who runs a chicken stall near the mosque.

Bagwan and her family locked themselves inside — only peering out of a small hole to see where the crowd was going.

Some in the mob kept yelling at her family to open the shop's door, "so they could attack," she said. "They were screaming abuses and anti-Muslim slurs at us." 

She said her son was at the mosque when the mob entered and was one of 10 people injured. Nurul, a 31-year-old-engineer, sustained deadly blows to the head. 

In the early hours of the morning, Ayesha got the news that her husband had been killed. 

"I was in complete shock. My mind just stopped," she said. She was six months pregnant at the time.

The attack was one of 41 incidents of communal tension and violence in Maharashtra, India's richest state, between January and October 2023, tracked by the Washington-based research group India Hate Lab (IHL). 

According to the group's data, Maharashtra saw the highest concentration of rallies and gatherings featuring hate speech against minorities last year: 118 out of the 668 events the researchers documented across India.