In India’s largest Muslim ghetto
On a recent afternoon, after a two-hour drive out of Mumbai, I followed a highway hugging the low hills of Mumbra, north-east of the city, near the Thane creek. As the road forked downhill, hundreds of grimy, teetering buildings stacked like tattered books in a neglected public library were the first glimpse intimation of Mumbra, India’s largest Muslim ghetto.
Mumbra expanded with great velocity in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The Bombay riots of December 1992, which overwhelmingly killed Bombay Muslims, and the retaliatory bomb blasts in January 1993 by the Muslim underworld, reconfigured the social geography of the city. Bombay Muslims from riot-hit areas sought safety in numbers and found it in Mumbra, where Muslims from the Konkani coast had a long-standing presence. Through a combination of the desire for safety among Muslims, the relatively cheaper price of apartments, and continued rural-urban migration, Mumbra’s population grew 20 times from about 45,000 before the 1992 riots to more than 9,00,000 in the 2011 Census — possibly one of the fastest expansions of an urban area in India.
Beyond the doors of the ghetto, a Mumbra address often carries a degree of prejudice and suspicion. A lawyer spoke of trying to buy an Idea Internet dongle at a Thane shop and being turned away; an Urdu publisher spoke of waiting months to get a landline and broadband connection from BSNL. A few weeks ago, a private school in Panvel, a suburb 24 kilometres from Mumbra, decided to ban admissions of students from the ghetto, claiming that they behave badly. Waris Pathan, the Byculla area legislator from Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, led a protest against the school administration, which eventually revoked its decision.
Along with the strivings, a sense of neglect and discrimination pervades Mumbra, which does not have a single public hospital. The nearest public hospitals are in Kalua and Thane. Several clinics and rudimentary private hospitals have come up. Mumbra goes without electricity for at least six hours everyday. “We are No. 1 in load-shedding,” Mr. Qazi laughed. “But things are a lot better compared to even five years ago.”
The absence of banking facilities or companies denying home delivery of products has, for years, been the standard attitude towards India’s Muslim ghettoes. Barely an hour from the Indian Parliament, the Okhla Muslim ghetto in New Delhi did not have a single bank despite a population of several lakh. Two years ago, Jammu and Kashmir Bank opened a branch in Zakir Nagar. Juhapura, the Ahmedabad ghetto, whose population doubled after the 2002 riots, still does not get piped water or gas, and remains excluded from Ahmedabad’s vaunted public transport network.
Mumbra also lives with a hostile relationship with the police. It was home to Ishrat Jahan, who was killed along with three other men by the Gujarat police. The Central Bureau of Investigation later described the killings as a “fake encounter”. Taunts of being a safe house for terrorists are often thrown at Mumbra. Last March, several hundered policemen raided Mumbra one and a half hours after midnight. A video recorded by a local journalist shows scores of men being paraded through dark streets by the police, bundled into police vans, and held for hours in Mumbra police station. Around 80 people, including young students, poets and old men were arrested. The police claimed to be looking for two petty thieves wanted for chain-snatching.
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