‘Not Hindu-Muslim row’: Mira Road residents say politicians changing nature of ‘peace haven’

Mumbai: Earlier this week, on Tuesday evening, Shamsher Alam of Mira Road’s Shanti Nagar stepped away from his shop for some time. The atmosphere in the area had been tense since the day before, when a procession through the adjacent area of Nayanagar, celebrating the consecration of Ram Lalla in Ayodhya, allegedly came under attack, leading to clashes.

Even so, nothing could have prepared Alam for what happened next. As his son Sahil, 19, ran their boutique, and his brother-in-law worked inside, bike-borne assailants stopped outside and started pelting the shop with stones.

When Sahil failed to stop the attackers, he started filming the attack. The video has been accessed by ThePrint.

By the time the assailants left, a glass pane installed at the shop had been shattered, and the mannequins placed inside broken.

“We went to the police to file an FIR but instead they just took an NC (complaint for a non-cognisable offence),” Alam told ThePrint. “Even two days later, there has been no FIR.”

“We have submitted the proof of CCTV, and videos that my son took but all they say is that we will contact you later,” he added.

Shattered glass outside the boutique | Purva Chitnis | ThePrint

Shattered glass outside the boutique | Purva Chitnis | ThePrint

As he counted his losses, Alam talked about the clashes at Nayanagar and asked why the police “took swift action in one case, and not in the other”.

In the case of the Nayanagar violence, the police booked and arrested 13 accused within 24 hours.

Police deny the charge, saying an investigation is under way into the wave of tensions.

“The investigation is going on,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police Jayant Bajbale. “So far, 10 FIRs have been filed in the overall Mira Road violence. Twenty-five arrests have been made and more arrests are expected.”

Speaking to ThePrint, Shamsher Alam said he has run his shop, Saba Boutique in Mira Nagar’s Shanti Nagar — a Hindu-dominated area with a significant Muslim population — for 13 years.

His son said their Hindu neighbours had stepped in to defend him during the attack, and residents of Mira Road recalled how the area’s neighbourly fabric had held strong even through the aftermath of the 1992 Babri masjid demolition.

But a change appears to be afoot, they added, pointing to communally charged statements made by the local MLA, Geeta Bharat Jain of the BJP, and certain provocative programmes held since last year.

Alam and his neighbours said the attackers knew their target.

Shops that had put up saffron flags that read “Jai Shri Ram” were spared, they added. The others attacked included a mobile shop close by and a tempo driver.

ThePrint reached Geeta Jain by phone but multiple calls went unanswered.

‘Haven of peace’

Shanti Nagar and Nayanagar are both located in Mira Road, a Thane suburb on the outskirts of Mumbai.

Nayanagar was formed around 1979 as a Muslim-dominated area, the foundation stone laid by the late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray and Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) leader G.M. Banatwala.

This area, located very close to the Mira Road railway station, was conceived as a planned residential area for Muslims.

Although the understanding between Thackeray and Banatwala’s IUML did not last long, Nayanagar has been a haven of peace, residents said.

According to the 2011 Census, Muslims comprise 16 percent of the population (8 lakh) under the Mira Bhaindar Municipal Corporation. Most of them reside in and around Nayanagar, which has an estimated population of 35,000.

Speaking to ThePrint, the local residents said that even during the peak of the communal riots in Mumbai — then Bombay — in 1992-93, after the demolition of Babri Masjid, Nayanagar stayed peaceful.

After the riots, said Sadique Basha, a local activist, many Muslims from Dongri and other parts of Mumbai started shifting to Nayanagar, making it “a larger ghetto”.

“For years, Hindus and Muslims stayed peacefully here without any communal tensions,” he added.

Just about 200 metres from the epicentre of Monday’s violence, there is a Ganesh Mandir in Nayanagar. The temple was constructed around 30 years ago and, every year, local residents celebrate its “sthapna din”.

“We have puja, aarti, even bhandara every year on the ‘sthapna din’ and Hindus-Muslims come together to participate in it,” said Omkar Gupta, a local shopkeeper. “Not only that, we celebrate the Ganesh festival and other festivals without any issues,” he added.

A similar story is shared about Shanti Nagar.

Alam, a resident of Mira Road for 30 years, said he had never felt alienated in the area, saying his 13 years of running a shop in Shanti Nagar had been smooth.

Sahil Alam said when “the assailants tried to attack me, the neighbouring Hindus rushed to help me and saved me”.

“They told the mob that he is our own and not to attack him and that is how I got saved. The mob would have otherwise hit me that evening,” he said.

‘Not a Hindu-Muslim fight’

Tension in the area, however, has been palpable since 22 January. A day after the clashes, the Mira Bhaindar Municipal Corporation razed “illegal” structures in Nayanagar’s Haidri Chowk with bulldozers. While residents questioned the timing of the drive, the civic body said it was a “routine exercise”.

Later that evening was when Alam’s shop was attacked.

Local residents told ThePrint that BJP MLAs Nitesh Rane and Geeta Bharat Jain visited the area Tuesday and gave objectionable speeches — they have also taken on a divisive tone on social media — and tried to disturb the atmosphere of the area.

Since the formation of the Mira Road assembly constituency in 2009, the BJP has dominated it with either the party or its affiliates winning both the constituency and the municipal corporation.

In the 2019 assembly elections, incumbent MLA Geeta Jain fought as an Independent and defeated BJP MLA Narendra Mehta by over 15,000 votes. She has since joined the BJP.

There have been other worrying aspects too over the last couple of years, the residents added.

In March 2023, Kajal Hindustani aka Kajal Shingala from Gujarat, who is known for her anti-Muslim rhetoric, was invited to give a speech at a ‘Hindu Jan Akrosh’ rally arranged at Mira Road.

“Love Jihad and land jihad are connected to terrorism, all those topiwalas in the waqf board are terrorists,” she said in her speech, a video of which is available on YouTube. Later, an FIR was registered against her for the speech.

In the second half of March 2023, a ‘darbar’ of Bageshwar Dham baba was conducted in the area where he purportedly spoke about making India a “Hindu Rashtra”.

After the violence this week, Jain reportedly weighed in on reports of Nayanagar residents placing barricades at the area’s entry points, and spoke of the potential consequences of giving Hindus a “free hand for five minutes”, emphasising their dominance in the area.

Said Basha, “Things started going downhill after that (the statements since last year).”

“These are not some fringe elements or anti-social players, they are MLAs and people with public responsibility.”

Iqbal Mahadik, who runs an NGO in Mira Bhayandar, said “this is not a communal fight but a political fight”.

“This is about political power and not a Hindu-Muslim fight,” he added. “No Hindu or no Muslim here wants any fight. They want to live peacefully as they always did.”

(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)