Mumbai on the Brink
Twenty years after Ayodhya, India’s commercial capital is riven again by fear and communal violence
Twenty years after Ayodhya, India’s city of hope is riven again with fear and communal tension.
Mohammed Amarul Islam Shaikh, 45, lives in a 200- sq- ft room, and runs a small restaurant in Garib Nagar, Bandra East. He is a Bengali Muslim, from Murshidabad in West Bengal. In December 1992, his motherin- law Zeenatun Nissa, a Congress party member, was shot and wounded by the Mumbai Police while protesting against the Babri Masjid demolition. His eldest son Umar, 24, was a hawker, passionate about body- building and Salman Khan movies. On August 11, Umar was shot dead by the police outside the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus ( CST), Mumbai’s largest railway station, during mob violence to express anger at
the death of Muslims in the Assam riots. This became the epicentre of a nationwide panic about Muslim reprisals.
The Shaikhs suffered in protests and earned a livelihood during two decades of peace between two epochal episodes of communal frenzy. But there’s a major difference between 1992- 93 and 2012: Muslims are no longer cowering before one- sided assaults; they are ready for a counter- attack.
Two decades after 1992, Mumbai is on the brink again. The fear is latent but palpable. The city has been tested: Bomb blasts in buses and trains, culminating in the epic Pakistan- planned assault on Mumbai on November 26, 2008. Mumbai has maintained peace with impressive tenacity and commitment. But a series of violent incidents in Assam have put the city on edge.
“There is a sense of uneasiness in the city,” says former Mumbai Police commissioner Mahesh Narayan Singh. “The confidence of the people in the police machinery has also been shaken because I cannot recall another time when the police have been beaten up and humiliated like this,” he says.
The July 20 episode in Assam, when Bodo tribals targeted migrant Bengali Muslim settlers in Kokrajhar district killing 78 people and over 400,000 driven to relief camps. The episode seemed too remote to affect Mumbai. On August 11, the Raza Academy, a Mumbai- based Sunni Barelvi group, organised a seemingly innocuous protest. On its agenda was not only Assam but the even more remote Myanmar, where the military government has cracked down on Rohingya Muslims. The tension had been building up through the month of Ramzan which coincided with the North- East violence.
An SMS sent out on August 14 spread like wildfire. It warned of attacks on non- Muslims from the North- east after Eid on August 20. On August 15 and 16, nearly 15 per cent of the 200,000strong North- east community in Bangalore fled towards Assam. In Pune, more than half the city’s 20,000strong North- easteners left. It was the largest urban flash migration. The Union home ministry traced the cyber hatred to Pakistan in what counter- ter- rorism expert B. Raman termed a “cyber jihad”.
A quiet but unstated and inflammatory campaign had begun during the month of Ramzan. Anonymous posters the size of car windscreens, began appearing in Muslim- dominated suburbs of Mumbai, outside mosques and meat shops. They showed graphic pictures of dead children with their throats slit and piles of corpses. ‘ Pray for them,’ the Urdu captions on the posters read. Then, in late July, sulphurous video clips spread through the city. Groups of Muslim youth gathered around smartphones outside tea shops and restaurants across the city after they broke their daily fast. In Mumbra, a Muslim- dominated suburb that saw fiery protests in 2007 against the Danish newspaper cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, Urdu newspapers and community leaders spoke about the killings of Muslims in Assam and Myanmar. “I heard in a mosque about the killings. People were talking about it agitatedly,” says Firoze Khan, 25, a vegetable vendor. Iqbal Ansari, 32, a bespectacled college graduate from Uttar Pradesh who runs a small business in Govandi, a Muslim- dominated area of Mumbai, is angry when he talks of “global atrocities” against Muslims. “I believe every Muslim in the world is my brother… my blood boils when I hear of their murders,” he says.
Provocative SMSs ricocheted through Mumbai. One said: ‘ Pakistanis have entered Myanmar for revenge. They have smashed several Buddhist idols. This news is true, check this on youtube and transfer this to all Muslims.’ This was blatant incitement, in addition to being a fabrication. Word
spread around Mumbai’s mosques after Friday prayers on August 10 that a march was being organised at Azad Maidan by Muslim groups to protest atrocities against the Rohingyas. Motorcycle- borne youth drove through Muslim areas shouting “Dua karo, dua karo aur chalo Azad Maidan ( Pray for them and go to Azad Maidan)”.
Ayaz Shaikh, 19, flicks his Chinesemade ‘ Chi- phone’ outside Mira Road’s Naya Nagar, a Muslim- dominated enclave, to show the six- minute ‘ Assam- wala clip’. The video is of poor quality and shoddily edited. It shows a burqa- clad lady tearfully narrating in-
stances of mob violence. Her voice is interrupted by grisly visuals of dismembered bodies, particularly of children, and a voiceover calls on Muslims to rise and slay the ‘ kufar’ ( non- believers). “Bahut galat ho raha hai ( What’s going on is very wrong),” says Ayaz of the incidents. Many Muslims are buying into an international narrative of oppression and believe the UPA prefers silence to protest when Muslims are targeted. “The Government condemns the killing of Sikhs in US gurdwaras but is silent about the killing of Muslims in Assam and Myanmar,” says Ayaz.
Social media has sharpened the political discourse of the young. “When mainstream media did not prominently cover the Assam riots, the youths turned to the social media. What they saw there, however, was not the truth,” says Sarfaraz Arzoo, editor of the Mumbai- based Urdu daily Hindustan.
When the Raza Academy sought permission for the meeting, police assumed not more than 2,000 people would gather. Around 700 policemen were deployed. By 3.30 p. m., a crowd of over 50,000 Muslims was present. One of the speakers criticised the media for not focusing on the plight of Muslims in Assam and Myanmar. This was the spark that lit a fuse. The mob turned on TV vans and journalists. When the police intervened, they were attacked too. Over 55 policemen were savagely beaten, a policewoman molested, two
police vans and three OB vans turned into smoking metal heaps. Between 3.30 p. m. and 4.30 p. m., the police lost control of CST station.
Police say the protests were not spontaneous. Young men smuggled pet- rol and kerosene in soft drink bottles for arson, stones were brought in chartered trucks in which they had come and steel rods were disguised as flagpoles. It is still unclear who provoked the violence. There is the usual speculation about an underworld hand. Maharashtra Home Minister R. R. Patil, whose survival in office has become increasingly tenuous, says “investigations will be concluded in another four to five days”.
Muslims comprise 18 per cent or nearly 2.23 million of Mumbai’s 1.24 crore population. They have traditionally voted for the Congress but political analyst Hemant Desai predicts the party will haemorrhage Muslim votes this time. “Mumbai’s municipal election trends show that local Muslims opted for the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena ( MNS) over the Congress while migrant Muslims voted for the Samajwadi Party,” he says.
Other political forces are moving in
to mobilise the anger. On August 8, Asaduddin Owaisi, MP of the All India Majlis- e- Ittehadul Muslimeen, created an uproar in Lok Sabha. He warned that the Assam violence would lead to a third wave of radicalisation of Muslim youth; the first two waves, he said, followed the Babri demolition in 1992 and the Gujarat riots of 2002.
Owaisi is in no mood to relent. Sitting in his party headquarters at Darussalam, Hyderabad, his constituency, Owaisi says, “What I said was not a threat but a warning. The Government is underestimating the fallout of Assam.” The mood, he says, is ‘ Musalmano par zulm ho raha hai ( Muslims are being targeted)’. “The anger is simmering,” he cautions, adding that the Muslims need a powerful political voice. “Don’t give us symbolic leadership like making a Muslim the vice- president of the country. Nobody gets taken in by that anymore. Muslims want to be part of the mainstream,” he says.
The Azad Maidan flashpoint arrived, rather conveniently, on the eve of a tectonic political shift in Mumbai. The city’s political circles are rife with speculation of a Raj and Uddhav Thackeray tie- up. In July, Raj, who broke away from Shiv Sena to form MNS in 2005, held vigil at Lilavati Hospital as cousin Uddhav underwent an angioplasty.
After Uddhav’s hastily called and thinly attended rally at Azad Maidan on August 20, it was his cousin who stole the show on the following day. Mumbai held its breath on August 21 because it feared a repeat of the 1993 cycle of violence. Nearly all of Mumbai’s 40,000strong police force swamped the streets in numbers rarely seen before.
Raj’s possible homecoming was signalled with a front- page article in Sena mouthpiece Saamna, the first time he had featured on Page 1 since he left the party. His move to claim the right- wing political space has befuddled his young Muslim supporters who were attracted because he had weakened the Sena. “He is indirectly warning us of the 1993 riots where the Sena played an overt role,” says a Muslim youngster from Mohammed Ali Road.
Already, politicians have sensed in this fresh crisis an opportunity to undermine the police. On August 23, Mumbai police commissioner Arup Patnaik was replaced with Satyapal Singh. Patnaik is now Managing Director of the dormant Maharashtra State Security Council, part of Home Minister Patil’s proposal to give him a respectable kick upstairs. But Patil himself may have to pay the price for the violence— both Opposition and his Cabinet colleagues are gunning for him. The 26/ 11 attack happened on his watch, and he had to quit in ignominy after his callous statement: “Bade bade shaharo mein ek aad hadsa ho jata hain ( Freak incidents keep happening in big cities).” But he was reinstated in November 2009 when the Congress- NCP returned to power.
Hindustan editor Sarfaraz Arzoo traces the root cause of Muslim anger to the Maharashtra government’s apathy. “The government spends thousands of crores on tribal development but just Rs 260 crore for development schemes for the Muslim community,” he says. In 2006, a seven- member committee headed by Justice Rajinder Sachar noted that though Muslims made up 14 per cent of India’s population, their social status was lower than that of the Scheduled Castes. The committee recommended, among other things, the setting up of an equal opportunity commission and increase in employment opportunities for Muslims. “I haven’t kept track of what has happened with the recommendations but the Government tells me they are being gradually implemented,” says Justice Sachar. The upsurge of anger proves otherwise.