Terror threat leaves Kashmiris in Mumbai in the lurch

The tight security in the city following intelligence inputs about four terrorists hiding in the city has left a couple of Kashmiri ‘peer babas’ stranded on the streets.

For almost five decades, every year about 40 to 50 peer babas from Kashmir come to Mumbai during Ramzan and stay in open spaces belonging to the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA). Though these people take permission from the authorities to stay for three months, they end up staying much longer. But in the past 50 years, nobody has objected to it and no one has taken any action against them.

But this year is different. The police have asked them to go back to Kashmir, citing security reasons. “We have been coming here for so many years. The local people know us by our names,” Ghazi Mujeed Shah said. “We have never troubled anyone. Why are we being treated like this?” It will be difficult for the group to return home now because of heavy snowfall in Kashmir, the 80-year-old said.

As is the practice, the group gets no objection certificates (NOC) from their local police stations in Kashmir. Once they reach Mumbai, they show it to the police and get permission to stay in vacant spaces on MHADA plots.

A MHADA security guard said that he had been seeing the group for the past four years. “They don’t cause any harm to anyone,” he said. “But they do stay much longer than they are permitted to. Their voter cards don’t seem authentic.”

Initially, the group used to stay in the Gareeb Nagar area of Bandra. But the area has been completely encroached upon and has no open space left. Following this, the group started staying on MHADA’s survey no 7&8 situated opposite Qureshi Nagar in Bandra.

The group has now sought help from Aliya Khan, an activist in Bandra. “We are trying to help them as much as possible,” Khan said. “We approached the Mhada and the police. No one could clearly tell us why they were being driven out of the city. But it seems that action is being taken against them because of terror threats.”

Additional commissioner of police Amitabh Gupta said that the police was reviewing the security in Bandra. “The police are checking the credentials of people living in the area,” Gupta said.