Summary of this article
The serial bombings deeply fractured neighbourhood relations, accelerating a kind of residential segregation that had been almost invisible in earlier decades.
What led to the unrest in Mumbai was the demolition of Babri Masjid, says documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan.
Today, democratic protests are relegated to hidden, fenced-off corners of Azad Maidan, effectively suffocating their visibility and stripping them of their power.
Long before the 1993 bombings fractured its skyline, Bombay pulsed as one of India’s most fiercely secular and cosmopolitan landscapes. Migrants from across the subcontinent—Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians, Jews—poured into the city, living shoulder-to-shoulder in the crushing density of its chawls and mill districts. It was a city where everyday survival demanded coexistence. The shared sweat of the local trains, the relentless hum of the factories, and the darkened halls of single-screen cinemas fostered a routine intimacy that transcended religious lines. Festivals like Ganesh Chaturthi and Muharram were celebrated with equal fervour, and a formidable working-class trade union culture united men and women under the banner of labour, rather than faith.
But by the late 1980s, this resilient secular fabric had begun to fray. The rise of identity-based politics and a growing tide of communal mobilisation across India slowly seeped into the city's soil. The breaking point arrived on 6 December 1992, when the demolition of the 16th-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya sent shockwaves across the country, fundamentally rewriting India's political and social landscape.
For Mumbai, the timeline of this trauma is often misremembered. Documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan stresses that the starting point of the city's descent into chaos must be accurately contextualized. "What led to the unrest in Mumbai was the demolition of Babri Masjid," Patwardhan explains. He points out that the initial reaction saw large-scale protests primarily by the Muslim community, who were met with severe police crackdowns resulting in a staggering loss of life. "Then again, after a month or so, the riots began again," he says. During this brutal second phase, the Shiv Sena took a leading role. While blood was spilled on both sides, Patwardhan says the majority of those killed in the ensuing months were Muslims. "That eventually led to the Mumbai bomb blasts," he states, drawing a direct line from the mosque’s rubble to the explosions that rocked the city.
While the spark was lit in far-away Ayodhya, the tinder had been meticulously laid at home. Human rights activist and journalist Teesta Setalvad, who extensively chronicled the riots, notes that the demolition was merely the "immediate and obvious provocation." Behind the sudden eruption of violence was a calculated campaign. Meticulous documentation later revealed that the public temper had been kept at a boiling point by hate-filled rhetoric printed in the pages of the Shiv Sena mouthpiece, Saamana, since July of 1992. "The Congress government led by Sudhakarrao Naik chose to let these crimes pass," Setalvad writes, adding that the Bombay Police’s choice to look the other way cemented those months as dark pages in India’s history.
For ordinary citizens, the political machinery of hate arrived directly at their doorsteps, turning familiar alleys into battlegrounds. Alka, now 53, remembers the suffocating dread that descended on Antop Hill in Wadala. At the time, she lived in a Muslim-dominated locality dotted with only a handful of Agri households. "My husband's rented shop was yet to be inaugurated," she recalls. It was January, and they were just three days away from hosting a hopeful Satyanarayan Pooja when the riots tore through their streets.
A visceral terror gripped her neighbourhood. "People kept chilli powder mixed with water ready for self-defence," Alka says, detailing the desperate, makeshift armory of ordinary people. Up on the potmalas—the overhead lofts typical of Mumbai’s chawls—families stockpiled kerosene and wooden molotov cocktails, ready to hurl them from their windows at approaching mobs.
Alka’s family was spared from the violence, and amidst the paralysing fear, profound moments of humanity somehow survived. "Our shop owner was Muslim," she remembers softly. When a fragile normalcy finally returned a month later, he handed over the keys and stood by them to help inaugurate their shop. Yet, the psychological scars remained impossible to ignore. Looking out her window, Alka would watch displaced women from a neighbouring locality ,whose homes had been reduced to as, walking the streets with their young children, their entire surviving lives wrapped in a single saree or dupatta. "This city has given us everything, but it hasn’t remained the same anymore," she laments, mourning the rising animosity in a place that once belonged to everyone.
This creeping animosity fundamentally redrew the map of the city. The violence deeply fractured neighbourhood relations, accelerating a kind of residential segregation that had been almost invisible in earlier decades. Social activist and author Ram Puniyani observes that the most immediate and lasting change post-1993 was this physical division. "Out of security reasons, the Muslim minority had to migrate from mixed localities into exclusively Muslim areas," Puniyani explains. He points to the sudden swelling of neighbourhoods like Mumbra, Jogeshwari, and Bhendi Bazaar. This forced migration birthed a tragic irony: as these communities were pushed into isolation for safety, conservatism grew, and the grassroots communal divide became deeply entrenched in the city's geography.
Yet, even in its darkest hours, Mumbai has a history of fighting back. Patwardhan remembers the defiant push for harmony, recalling groups like the Ekta Samiti that organised gruelling two-day peace marches from Azad Maidan to Thane, walking directly through the riot-torn streets. Puniyani shares this resilient optimism, highlighting modern grassroots initiatives like Mumbai for Peace and active women's groups in Mumbra that are currently working to bridge the gaping communal divide.
However, holding the line for peace is becoming an increasingly exhausting battle. Patwardhan warns that the state apparatus has grown hostile to these efforts. "Restrictions like Section 144 prevent gatherings of more than four people without permission," he notes. Today, democratic protests are relegated to hidden, fenced-off corners of Azad Maidan, effectively suffocating their visibility and stripping them of their power.
While the streets of Mumbai no longer burn with the manifest violence of 1992, both activists warn of an insidious, underlying threat. Puniyani describes the current climate as a "subterranean, sub-radar sort of tension." He notes that a relentless stream of social media propaganda leaves minority communities feeling perpetually intimidated. These communal sentiments don't manifest in a vacuum, Puniyani argues; they are actively intensified by ground-level forces who now operate with a frightening free licence.
