Tags:
Journalism of Courage
A statue is desecrated, a bomb goes off and cosy cohabitation splinters into raging communal passions. Whatever the reason for the religious discord, Mahim is one of the few places in Mumbai where the first splinters of violence are sparked off.
The three main religious spots in Mahim – Sitladevi temple, St Michael’s Church, and the Maktum Shah Baba Dargah, popularly called the Mahim Dargah — attract thousands of people on a daily basis.
As all three are located within a distance of one kilometre from each other, crowds of devotees cause major traffic problems on the Lady Jamshetji (LJ) road, a main road. Every Wednesday, the St Michael’s church holds mass from 6 am to 10 pm. “This mass is attended by a total of 10,000 people in different batches. Due to lack of space, most of the devotees are forced to stand on the road, holding up traffic for hours,” says ward officer Madhav Welling. With such huge crowds to cater to, hawkers do brisk business selling candles and other religious paraphernalia onthe main road and in the by-lanes. The sheer number of the devotees makes the bandobast arranged by the police specially for these days, ineffective.
Both the police and residents have time and again suggested that a flyover at the junction in front of St Michael’s church could bring much needed relief from the congestion.
Traffic can be diverted to this flyover, easing the bottleneck at the junction. According to police officials, the state government has turned a blind eye to the problem as repeated appeals from them to solve the problem have come to naught.
The Sitladevi temple on LJ road, one of the most popular Hindu shrines in the city, has thousands of people thronging to it every day. The Ganpati immersion at Mahim beach in late September is another occasion for devotees to throng the beach. This procession is second only to that near the Mayor’s Bungalow at Dadar. Noise and vehicular pollution reach an all-time high during these days as trucks transport lakhs of people and Ganesh statuesthere.
The Mahim Dargah is another place which attracts innumerable people. Moreover, every December the dargah becomes the stage for the Uroos, a ten-day fair which has people from all over the city thronging to it. During these ten days, traffic on L J road and its adjoining lanes comes to a standstill.
Officials at the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) now seem to be waking up to these problems. “The areas near the dargah and Kapad bazaar are a problem between 3 pm and 11 pm every day due to the illegal hawkers,” admits Welling. He says that the BMC has launched a drive to cleanse Mahim of illegal hawkers. “Moreover, hawking will be banned for 250 metres from both the Mahim as well as Matunga Road railway stations,” he adds. The drive is already on, but how long it can be sustained remains to be seen.
Apart from overcrowded roads and by-lanes, there is now fear among residents that the locality near the religious centres has become a haven for drug addicts and petty thieves. A largenumber of small eateries near the dargah offer free meals to the underprivileged. People donate money at these hotels asking the owners to feed a certain number of poor people.
According to police officials and residents, a large number of the people fed at these eateries are drug addicts and beggars.
The presence of these people here has, in a way, contributed to the fear that crime is on the rise in Mahim. “My car was stolen from More road,” says Milind Vaidya, former mayor and present municipal councillor from the area. Complaints of incidents of chain snatching and pick-pocketing are also on the rise. But the Mahim police claim that the crime rate in this area is not as bad as that in some other suburbs. “Drug addicts are not the serious offenders. They are far too weak to commit such crimes,” claims inspector Kalidas Bagul. Bagul also points out that often criminals from neigbouring Dharavi come to Mahim, indulge in criminal activities, and make their getaway via the Sion-Mahim link road.
Oneof the major obstacles in evicting the drug addicts and other suspects is lack of public support, according to police officials. “When we conduct eviction drives, people object saying that as they are paying for these people’s food, the police should not trouble them,” states a police official.
The beggars are also accused of spoiling the Mahim beach. “These people perform their daily ablution there,” says Naresh Chadda, a resident of thearea. Eviction drives conducted by the police are fraught with danger. Since the beach lies alongside a main road, beggars often flee in droves on to the road during such drives. This has resulted in a large number of accidents, according to the police.
Illegal tenements springing up in the suburb is another problem that the municipal administration has to deal with frequently. Nearly 500 hutments have taken over a patch of land in front of the Raheja hospital which was originally reserved for building an educational institution.
“These slums have beendemolished at least 25 times in the last seven years. Yet they have managed to rise like the phoenix,” says Vaidya.
According to him, though the hutments are demolished, the slum dwellers are not evicted. The latter reconstruct their homes the same evening that they have been pulled down, rendering the BMC officials’ efforts ineffective.
