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On January 29, shortly after Umair Naqwa returned from evening prayers in the predominantly Muslim neighbourhood of Dongri in Mumbai, he saw a crowd rushing towards a street corner. Thirty-five-year-old Naqwa left the grocery store in which he works to join the throng.
In the middle of the adoring crowd was standup comedian Munawar Faruqui, who had won the popular television reality show Bigg Boss the previous day. Sticking out of the sunroof of black car, the beaming Faruqui, 32, brandished a trophy above his head. The gaggle of thousands – most of them young men – cheered and captured the moment on their phones.
“I had to” join that crowd, Naqwa explained when I met him a few days later. “He proved even those from chawl and slums can become big.”
Pride in Faruqui’s victory in the reality show has been evident not only just in Dongri, where the young man worked in a utensils store for three years from 2007, and in Gujarat’s Junagadh where he was born and sold samosas with his mother. Muslims across the country joined a campaign to vote for him in a show that picks its winner based on an audience poll.
Faruqui’s dramatic journey from the hardscrabble streets of Dongri to become a national celebrity has powered his popularity among a section of the Muslim community. Many especially sympathise with his 37-day spell of imprisonment in 2021, when he was arrested ahead of a standup show in Indore because a Hindutva group claimed that he was going to make inappropriate remarks about Hindu deities. The police arrested him before he even took to the stage.
In the serpentine lanes of Dongri, almost everyone has a story to tell about Faruqui. Stop at a juice stall, a grocery store, a mobile repair shop or a paan wala, each one will share an anecdote or two about him. “He played cricket with us in this gully,” said one person. Said another, “I saw him shoot in this lane for his song.”
Kashif Shah, who runs an NGO, put up posters urging Dongri residents to vote for Faruqui – and offered free blood tests to those who did. “It is rare for people from Dongri to rise like this,” he said.
The triumph of a young Indian Muslim at the time when the community is increasingly being marginalised by Hindutva forces has buoyed spirits. “The present state of affairs in India is such that Muslim community is finding even the smallest of reasons to celebrate,” said Aamir Edrisy of the Association of Muslim Professionals in Dongri.
Young Muslims, he said, sense “negativity around them”. He noted the recent hate rallies against Muslims in Maharashtra , frequent assaults on community members and the toxicity against Islam on social media.
For decades, Dongri was stereotyped as the neighbourhood in which the notorious gangster Dawood Ibrahim had his roots. Now, Faruqui is being hailed as “Dongri ka Sher”, the Lion of Dongri, an icon who has provided a positive model for young people in the area.
Also held up proudly as a source of inspiration is Mohammed Syed Hussain, 28, who passed the Union Public Service Commission exam last year to become eligible to join the civil services. Shopkeepers remember Hussain reading late into the night under the streetlights in Dongri lanes, presumably because his home was too small to afford him the quiet needed to study.
But Faruqui is better known than Hussain, probably because young people are glued to social media and follow the entertainment world closely. “People relate with him,” Edrisy said. “They may not relate with a Salman Khan or a Shah Rukh Khan, but they feel they can be like Munawar and prosper.”
I heard variations of that thought as I chatted with young men in Dongri. Mohammed Faiz Qureshi, a 21-year-old mobile repair shop owner who has only passed the 12th standard, said that he does not watch Bigg Boss but voted for Faruqui nonetheless. He said that he wanted to extend support because he knew what happened to Faruqui in 2021 “was wrong”.
“People here talk about his arrest, wrongful confinement and how Muslims are being pulled down,” Qureshi said.
Hamza Memon, 23, a shop assistant, said Faruqui’s victory is a victory for the entire community.
Not everyone in Dongri agrees. A woman at Naqwa’s grocery store scoffed at the adulation Faruqui was receiving. “Those who don’t want to study are the ones following him,” she said. However, she confessed that she had voted for him too because he lived in Dongri and brought the neighbourhood some fame
Muslim activist MA Khalid said that if the Muslims community wants to progress, it needs to adopt role models like Hussain, who cleared UPSC, rather than Faruqi. “The young generation is wasting time on shows like Bigg Boss,” he sniffed. “There is so much more happening around us. Look at the Mira Road riots, look at the Gaza war.”
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