Ghost Of Aurangzeb Comes Back To Haunt Nagpur

When activists of the Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) torched an effigy of Aurangzeb on Maratha emperor Chhatrapati Shivaji라이브 바카라 birth anniversary in ‘Orange City’ Nagpur, the green cloth that wrapped it couldn’t go unnoticed.

On March 17, while the Vicky Kaushal-starrer Chhaava was still running to packed houses a month, with its depiction of the last years of Shivaji라이브 바카라 eldest son Sambhaji Maharaj and his execution by Aurangzeb, an arch-enemy of the Maratha empire, the activists had gathered beside the towering Shivaji statue at Shivaji Chowk demanding the removal of the 17th-century Mughal ruler라이브 바카라 grave at Khuladabad town in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district, some 500 km away. Hindutva organisations and top BJP leaders, including Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Nitesh Rane, a minister in his cabinet, had already raised the same demand in the weeks following Chhaava라이브 바카라 February 14 release.

Hours after the effigy was burned, a mob of Muslim men descended on the residential areas around Shivaji Chowk in the evening, pelting stones at houses, damaging the parked cars and setting motorbikes on fire. Word had gone around that the green cloth wrapping the effigy that was burnt at the demonstration was a chador with Quranic verses on it. The ensuing clashes in the adjoining neighbourhoods of Bhaldarpura, Hansapuri and Tilak Road left one Muslim man dead, and 33 policemen, including three senior officers and a lady constable, grievously injured.

“It was on hearing that the burnt green cloth had verses from the Quran that a large crowd of Muslims came in the evening to protest near the Shivaji statue,” says Shafiq Ahmed, a resident of Bhaldarpura, one of the main sites where curfew is imposed. “As Muslims, we don’t mind the burning of Aurangzeb라이브 바카라 effigy or demands for the removal of his grave.”

Standing a few meters from the Shivaji statue in his Bhaldarpura neighbourhood, 42-year-old Sunny Davdharia says, “March 17 will be remembered as khatarnak (dangerous) in Nagpur라이브 바카라 history. Never had we seen anything so frightening. Hindus and Muslims had lived peacefully on opposite sides of the street for decades. What happened that day was shameful. Stones were hurled at our houses. The rioters were not our local Muslim brothers. They were outsiders.” 

According to police officers and eyewitnesses, Minority Democratic Party leader Fahim Khan led a protest march to the Ganesh Peth police station demanding action against Bajrang Dal and the VHP for hurting the sentiments of Muslims. A large group of people raising slogans glorifying Aurangzeb arrived at the Shivaji statue, Muslims leaving the two local mosques after evening prayers also arrived in the street, leading to confusion. “After the evening prayers in the mosques, the maulanas appealed on the loudspeakers asking the namazis to disperse quietly,” recalls Mukhtar Ahmed, who offered namaz that day at the Tajao Raja masjid opposite the Shivaji statue. Over the next two hours, Muslim men armed with sticks, stones and knives went on a rampage, pelting stones at vehicles and houses of mostly Hindu families.

“They smashed the windows in front of our eyes,” says Pushpa Bansode, three of whose family라이브 바카라 cars were damaged. “We were too scared to step out until the mob left.” A few steps away the burnt remains of a car at the entrance to Ram Galli and seven cars with their windows smashed parked outside the row of houses stand as reminders of that fateful evening. “From 8.04 to 8.25 pm, we can see people in our lane carrying petrol bombs and sharp objects, attacking our two cars,” says 16-year-old Harsh Dahikar, showing the CCTV footage.

Four days later, it라이브 바카라 an unusually quiet Friday afternoon at the otherwise bustling marketplace surrounding the Shivaji statue, now guarded by a security cordon of makeshift ropes, metal gates and the watchful eyes of police personnel. The statue is right in front of the Jumma Darwaza, an early 18th-century stone arch that is all that remains of a wall around Chand Sultan Shah라이브 바카라 fortress in Mahal, the oldest and central part of the city.

Chand Sultan belonged to the Rajgond dynasty of indigenous Adivasis who had embraced Islam and ruled from nearby Deoghar until he shifted the capital to Nagpur. The gateway he built became a symbol of resistance in 1857 after the British hanged the bodies of nine freedom fighters, including eight Muslims, as a grim warning against rebellion. In the 1960s, after the formation of Maharashtra during the reorganisation of states on linguistic lines, the arch was renamed Gandhi Gate as a tribute to the martyrs.

Just a short distance away are the headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Hedgewar Smruti Mandir, a memorial dedicated to the pioneers of the RSS—Keshav Baliram Hedgewar and Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar—in Reshimbagh, along with the defunct historic office of the Hindu Mahasabha, which was established by Madan Mohan Malviya as a Hindu pressure group within the Indian National Congress a decade before the RSS was founded in 1925.

The syncretic fusion of Hindu and Islamic culture in the backyard of the Hindu-nationalist Sangh라이브 바카라 home ground of Mahal had given Nagpur a reputation as a secular and peaceful town. Muslim families in the lanes and neighbourhoods surrounding the RSS offices claim they never feared the Sangh or its activists.

“Muslims know that Sangh is peaceful and would never harm them,” says RSS activist Amol Pusadkar. “Hindus and Muslims have lived together in the Mahal area and the Sangh has never been involved in riots. Our marches pass through Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods, but there has never been a problem,” he adds.

In the past 100 years, Nagpur has witnessed major Hindu-Muslim strife only twice. Before the violence in 1992 following the pulling down of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, there had been three days of rioting in 1927 when Muslims refused to allow the procession of goddess Mahalaxmi during the Navratri festival after Hedgewar led a Ganpati procession with drums and music in front of a mosque in Mahal.

Following the violence of March 17, the BJP-led state government ordered a massive crackdown based on incriminating evidence captured in several CCTV cameras. CM Devendra Fadnavis said the pattern in which the violence unfolded showed that the action was “pre-planned” by Muslims. The fact that a Muslim-led mob carried out violence so close to the Sangh headquarters as well as the residences of Union minister Nitin Gadkari and Fadnavis, political observers suggest, provoked the BJP to unleash a form of “collective punishment” against Muslims.

The opposition Congress and Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) slammed Fadnavis, who also controls the home department, for alleging a conspiracy after failing to prevent the riot in his hometown. In fact, BJP leaders have suggested that a “larger conspiracy” involving external forces such as Bangladeshi and Pakistani elements could not be ruled out.

Nagpur-based veteran RSS scholar Dilip Deodhar says the violence was the handiwork of non-local extremist forces who tried to organise a large-scale riot. “The local Muslims were not involved as most of them support the BJP라이브 바카라 Gadkari and Fadnavis. A handful of people came at lightning speed and disappeared after a short time. The Congress has been trying to provoke Muslims against Hindus. This time they succeeded,” Deodhar alleges.

During his first visit to his hometown after the clash, a furious Fadnavis vowed to make rioters pay for the damage they caused to property. “In Maharashtra, we take action our way. Where a bulldozer is needed, it will be used. Any wrongdoing will be crushed, and no one will be spared,” he said in a media interaction.

While nine Hindu activists were arrested for hurting religious sentiments and released on bail on the same day, the Nagpur police has so far rounded up at least 114 Muslim men, including juveniles and key accused Fahim Khan, whose house was razed to the ground by the Nagpur Municipal Corporation. The Bombay High Court stayed the demolition of the property of another accused and lashed out against the “high-handedness”. Thirteen FIRs, including four complaints related to sharing inflammatory content on social media, have been lodged in different parts of the city.

As all the riot accused are Muslims, many from the community accuse the authorities of bias and demand a fair investigation. “Most of the accused are innocent bystanders who came out of their houses to see the chaos or left the mosques after evening prayers,” says activist-advocate Asif Qureshi, who has formed a lawyers’ collective to represent the accused.

On March 21, police raided Sabir Khan라이브 바카라 house in Ganjipeth and detained his four nephews aged 17 and another aged 16 on charges of stone pelting. Recalling the evening of March 17, Khan says he was returning home with his brothers and nephews after closing their fabrication shop when they saw people running helter-skelter. “We ran towards our house, and two Hindu friends of our children also came with us out of fear. In a few minutes, several policemen tried to break into our house,” Sabir said. The police suspected stone pelters were hiding in the two-storeyed house. “We said there were no rioters in the house, but they threw tear-gas canisters into the house as we held on to the metal gate. As we feared they would break the gate, someone threw cold water on them from our top floor and they left,” Shaista Khan says.

Nafisa Begum and her husband Shaikh Feroz, a vegetable vendor, say their sons Shaikh Fayyaz (32) and Shaikh Aifaz (29) were arrested on March 19 from their house in Bengali Panja, a Muslim-dominated area of Bhaldarpura, when the family was hosting the 10th-day funeral ceremony of a dead relative.

Standing outside the Ganesh Peth police station and holding the blood-stained shirt Fayyaz wore that day, Nafisa says, “They had been fasting for Roza all day when the police thrashed them and took them away. I just want to check if they are fine and hope they got some food to break their fast.” She claims her sons were attending to their vegetable business during the stone pelting and did not participate in any violence. 

The list of accused also includes the names of the Muslims who reportedly filed an FIR against the VHP and Bajrang Dal for hurting religious sentiments. Saif Ali Khan (28) from the Vathoda neighbourhood, who had filed a complaint at the Ganesh Peth police station against the burning of the cloth with holy verses, was among those arrested by the police.

Rajendra Singal, the commissioner of police, denies any bias or political pressure. “Our priority is to keep the peace so people can celebrate the festivities in the coming days,” he says. Advocate Qureshi, however, questions the lack of swift action by the police against the VHP and Bajrang Dal members. “Why did the police not arrest them when they were burning the effigy in the green cloth? Why are the police not investigating the root cause of the violence?” he asks. Mufti Mujtaba Sharif Khan from Darul Uloom Amjadiah, an Islamic religious body, says the issue of the desecration of the holy chadar has been sidelined. “No one is talking about the hurting of our sentiments,” he says. 

The VHP and Bajrang Dal, however, claim the activists burned only a green piece of saree used to wrap the effigy. “We do not intentionally hurt any religion and treat all religions with equal respect,” says Amol Thackeray, Nagpur head of the VHP who was at the demonstration. “If any video shows the burning of a sacred cloth, then it is fabricated,” he adds.

According to Neha Dhabade, executive director of the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism (CSSS), the state action flouting laws and disproportionately targeting the minority with mass detentions and “bulldozer justice” resembles the “authoritarian” enforcement practices in BJP-ruled states such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Assam. “This disturbing pattern of collective punishment in the name of riots, dividing and polarising the minorities, particularly Muslims, was earlier not seen in Maharashtra,” she says.

Dhabade, who studied communal disturbances across the country in the latest CSSS report titled ‘Hegemony and Demolitions: The Tale of Communal Riots in India in 2024’, found Maharashtra to be the epicentre of communal violence. Among the 59 cases across the country, Maharashtra accounted for the maximum with 12, mostly disturbances triggered during religious festivals or processions.

“The riots in Nagpur fit this pattern,” says Dhabade, noting that Fadnavis led from the front in warning of dire consequences against the minorities. “There is a competition among the chief ministers of the BJP-ruled states to outdo each other. The bar is set high with UP CM Yogi Adityanath라이브 바카라 bulldozer justice and Maharashtra has unfortunately emulated this extreme model in handling communal incidents.”

According to Dhabade, the Nagpur riot sent a larger message across the country that the state will deal with Muslims using authoritarian, even unconstitutional, mechanisms. “Hatred has its dividends. Polarisation helps electorally. Riots like these effectively lead to a breakdown of social agreements between the two communities, and we will see the same in Nagpur,” she says.

Citing her several field visits in riot-affected areas, Dhabade says the “theatre and nature of communal violence” has changed in the past decade. Unlike earlier, when major riots occurred in the aftermath of national events or tragedies—the 1947 Partition, the 1984 Delhi riots after Indira Gandhi라이브 바카라 assassination or the 1992 demolition of Babri mosque—riots now flare up over religious procession, festivals and small interpersonal disputes. Dhabade notes three major changes: the frequency of riot-like situations has increased; there are more small and sporadic incidents; and these incidents are taking place in new areas with no history of sectarian violence.

“These ‘blow hot, blow cold’ incidents that flare up for a few hours and are contained in a short span are effective in deepening polarisation, criminalisation and humiliation of Muslims,” she says. “This strategy helps in consolidation of the majority Hindu community and the othering of the Muslim minority. Now you don’t need threats of economic boycott of Muslims, changing of the Constitution or even elaborate planning of social engineering to cause large-scale riots. Such incidents are effective in depriving minorities and reinforcing their status as second-class citizens. Repeated occurrences of communal disturbance around the year strengthen majoritarian assertiveness and enable Hindutva ideology to take root in different parts of villages, towns and cities. Such polarisation is crucial for dismantling Maharashtra라이브 바카라 progressive and reformist political thought. The Phule-Shahu-Ambedkar ideologies, which challenged the upper-caste Brahminical hegemony and reinstated dignity to Dalit Bahujans, are embraced by both Hindus and Muslims, and deeply rooted in the socio-cultural fabric of the state라이브 바카라 hinterland.”

According to Dhabade, the BJP has achieved polarisation by keeping the communal cauldron boiling and creating fissures between communities. “It ultimately helps the party in consolidating Hindu votes and marginalising the minority,” she says.  

The coming days will be challenging as Nagpur is poised to be on high alert with a series of back-to-back festivities, including Eid on March 31, Ram Navami on April 6 and Hanuman Jayanti on April 14. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to attend the Gudi Padwa celebration on March 30, marking the Hindu New Year, where he will share the stage with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat in their first public appearance together in the city. Authorities are tight-lipped about whether Modi will visit the areas affected by the recent unrest, but police have confirmed that all security arrangements are in place. The developments in Nagpur—whether the city retreats in peace and follows restraint or gives in to sectarian passions—will be closely watched.

Shweta Desai is a senior editor based in Mumbai and reports on politics, conflicts, human rights, culture and gender