Twenty years on, the film explores some of the ways in which the '92 riots in Bombay have been and continue to be represented - in the realms of art and photojournalism. It weaves in and out of...
In the last two decades, that is after the violence of 1992-93, Mumbai has not seen any instance of large scale sectarian violence. The city though has since been polarised along narrowly defined identity lines, a phenomenon that adequately reflects in the emergence of exclusive neighbourhoods and housing units. The aftershocks of the violence continue to reverberate behind the façade of an uncanny calm as visible and invisible borders restrict free movement and interaction. With the rapid informalisation of the work opportunities and almost half of the city’s population being reduced to live in slums, the city is also being reorganised along the class lines. The sight of improbably high steel and glass towers rising above the working class districts is a common sight in the city. This process also unfolds in necessarily violent ways. Illegal demolitions and evictions and appropriation of public land by force or deceit are some of the common strategies with which the poor of the city are being dispossessed of their basic rights and entitlements.
These overlapping phenomena create newer and durable forms of marginalisation. Take for illustration the suburban township of Mumbra. 40 kilometres from the Island city centre, this township has grown exponentially in the last two decades. From 44,000 in 1992, the population of Mumbra today stands upwards of 800,000, three-fourths of which are Muslims who came here from different parts of the city after experiencing the violence of 1992-93. In a perpetual state of disrepair this high-density township has been recently in news for two events – the extra-judicial killing of one of its young residents Ishrat Jahan, considered a terror operative, and death of around 80 people in two building collapses in the area. These two incidents provide us the framework to understand the ways in which the inhabitants of Mumbra experience marginalisation on the basis of their identities and the space they occupy. Colloquially called Chhota Pakistan, a term which has been uncritically and mischievously deployed even by the civic bodies and the media, it is widely perceived as a hotbed of terrorist activity and squalor, lending its residents a damning label and precarious existence.
It needs to be emphasised here that migration to areas like Mumbra, or for that matter creation of other exclusive communities, was not voluntary. It is an evident outcome of the structural processes that have been allowed to advance unchecked by the state as it continues to abandon its citizenry to face the relentless vicious social and economic assaults.
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