Ahmedabad: Citizen Nagar, a colony on the southwestern outskirts of Ahmedabad city, was established by the Kerala State Muslim League Relief Committee for families displaced from Naroda Patiya, a Muslim neighborhood where 97 Muslims were killed during the Gujarat riots in 2002.
Situated next to one of the city’s dumping sites on the Pirana-Piplaj road, called the “Mount Pirana of Ahmedabad”, Citizen Nagar is now inhabited by over 100 Muslim families bearing witness to the sliding heaps of garbage, rivulets of toxic chemicals, and smoke billowing from burning garbage and chimneys of surrounding factories.
They are also under the constant threat of being evicted from the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, a local civic body that claims any house within a 500-metre radius of the garbage site is illegal.
Relegated by the state of Gujarat to live next to a “mountain of garbage”, the Muslim residents of Citizen Nagar said they had been consumed by filth, disease and neglect for decades.
Twenty years after they fled to escape communal violence, they had no quality of life or hope for the future. Things had been so bad for so long that their children had internalized their unsanitary living conditions, even joking about it with strangers.
A recent estimate revealed that the Pirana mound had 1.25 crore metric tonnes of garbage as against an estimated 80 lakh metric tons in 2012, The Times of India reported in June 2021.
In January 2020, while announcing the draft budget of the Amdavad Municipal Corporation (AMC), former municipal commissioner Vijay Nehra gave a deadline of 15 August 2022 for clearing the Pirana dumpsite. A year earlier, AMC’s budget proposal dedicated an estimated Rs 30 crore for the project. The deadline has expired. At the current rate of garbage disposal, the Ahmedabad Mirror reported that it will take the AMC 10 years to clear.
A questionnaire was emailed to the AMC authorities. We will update this story if and when they respond.
The use of bulldozers to demolish houses deemed illegal by local municipal bodies in other Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-run states, including in Gujarat, has added to their concerns in light of the hostility expressed by BJP leaders against Muslims in the state.
Home Minister Amit Shah, while campaigning for state elections in November, said BJP had established “permanent peace” in the state after the lesson they taught to the rioters in 2002. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat at the time.
While Shah did not name any community, in the communal riots that erupted after 50 Hindu karsevaks were killed when the train carrying them was set on fire, 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed.
Residents of Citizen Nagar, who survived the riots, said they live in one of the smallest and “most unlivable” Muslim ghettos of Ahmedabad.
A group of neatly dressed children were playing cricket in Citizen Nagar, when they saw our camera approaching them. One boy in a yellow shirt stood in the middle of the road with his hands crossed and a broad smile as he waited to be clicked. “Please turn on the camera bhaiya,” he politely insisted. Another boy, in a red cotton-shirt, giggled and said, “This is our Mount Abu,” pointing to a towering heap of garbage at the end of a narrow bylane.
This story was originally published in article-14.com . Read the full story here