FOR 89-year-old Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) chawl’s oldest resident Abdula Shakoor Ansari, ‘‘jail is a synonym for freedom struggle’’. His childhood sepia images still remain the 10 months inside Yerwada jail. This was at the peak of freedom struggle when he was 18 years old, and a grass root party worker for Majise-ehrar from Mominpura—Mumbai’s oldest weaver colony and a Muslim pocket in South Mumbai.

‘‘Pura Mominpura mohalla jail gaya tha. Par woh Hindustan ki azadi ki jung thi,’’ asserts the man whose son is married to Dr Jalees Ansari’s sister Shagufta.

Today though, when he overhears the neighbourhood women complain of another 18-year-old engineering student and resident of Mominpura called by the Mumbai Crime branch for questioning from Aurangabad, Abdula, like his colony Mominpura, goes into a cocoon.

Just days after the 7/11, Mominpura—the city’s oldest weavers colony in South Mumbai—hogged headlines for the arrest of Dr Tanveer Ansari for his alleged connections with the Terrible Tuesday’s serial blasts in local trains. Much to the misfortune of the colony—it was from the same neighbourhood that Dr Jalees Ansari (now serving a term in Ajmer Jail) had masterminded the 1993 terror attacks.

And now, in what the women in the colony complain is a routine practice after any terror bomb blast, ‘‘the Crime Branch officers have been combing the area in plain clothes, and they have called residents with passport post 2004 for questioning’’.

Abdulla has stopped reading newspapers. ‘‘News does not make us freedom fighters happy these days, especially what gets written about Mominpura,’’ he says. He and his contemporaries were all freedom fighters who later joined Hafeez Ali Bahadur Khan’s party and adopted the ‘‘Congress way of thinking’’ and satyagraha to fight the British.

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