Bound by the historic Mecca Masjid on the north and Lad Bazaar on the south, is Mohajirin camp. A settlement of Mohajirin , or migrants, it has about 150 small houses of those who fled their home in Karnataka and Marathwada to escape the communal conflagration in the late 1940s.
It stands in contrast to its surroundings – the sprawling masjid on one hand and the glittering bangle market on the other. Sandwiched between these two are the barely habitable accommodations at the camp, some of which stand out given their wafer-thin tin sheet roofs and crumbling walls.
Shaik Qayyum, born at the camp, has lived here for all the 51 years of his life. His father was a teenager when he fled his home town of Deoni in Maharashtra’s Latur district in 1948. It was the year that marked the beginning of Operation Polo, the annexation of the princely state of Hyderabad.
He says the ‘police action’, a widely used misnomer for Operation Polo, forced them to flee. “My father and his four brothers were separated when they fled Deoni. My father used to tell me that it took him several days to reach Hyderabad and that he hid in bushes, fields and even in a bowli to save his life,” Qayyum says. A once operational langar at the Mecca Masjid fed them and the locals offered them clothes before they could find work.
The camps’ narrow lanes are barely enough for two people to walk abreast. While some men are seen sitting on their haunches, women, who appear to be septuagenarians and octogenarians, are sitting cross-legged on the cemented floor outside their home.
One among those, Ameer Bee, arrived in the city from Basavakalyan in Karnataka. At the time, she was barely five years old. “I am told that we walked in dirt and kichhad (mud). We travelled on foot and in buses. But we reached here alive and well,” she recollects.
While some of the residents eke out a living by making lacquered bangles which they sell to shops at Lad Bazaar, others are hawkers. There are around 10 BC-E laddaf families who are engaged in mattress-making.
But their migration was not just on account of the Operation Polo. Experts believe that the communal violence in the aftermath of partition too led to this. The Centre for Deccan Studies secretary Sajjad Shahid says, “The wave of migration began before the Operation Polo. The post-partition riots of 1947 were also a cause of displacement. Communal tensions back then had greatly escalated. Hyderabad was largely safe, which was why they came here.”
The land parcel, about an acre, on which the Mohajirin camp sits is Muslim endowed. According to former Survey Commissioner Waqf Mohammed Asadullah, a gazette notification was issued in 1984 declaring it waqf and a part of the Mecca Masjid endowment.
Of late, a tug of war between the residents and the Mecca Masjid authorities has ensued. While the mosque management wants the residents, who it treats as tenants, to pay up rent, the latter are seeking a waiver of accruals.
Mecca Masjid superintendent Qadeer Siddiqui says in the 1920s, the land parcel belonged to Barq Jung Bahadul, a nobleman of the time. It was then acquired by the Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan in the late 1930s. “The payment was made through the sarf-e-khaas (the Nizam’s personal estate). It was then used for the Mecca Masjid and was later endowed to the mosque,” he says.
