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What's New > Press > 2009 > 2009.01.20: Bhau Korde and Waqar Khan
2009.01.20: Bhau Korde and Waqar KhanFrom $1Table of contentsNo headersPeace activists
Neha Sumitran,Time Out Mumbai, January 2009
 Most Mumbaikars have seen the Hum sab ek hai posters, with boys dressed up as a Hindu, a Muslim, a Sikh and a Christian. But few know that the image was created by 71-year-old Ramchandra “Bhau” Korde (right in picture) and 41-year-old Waqar Khan after the Mumbai riots of 1992-’93 as an advertisement for Dharavi’s cultural diversity. Both Korde and Khan have quintessential Mumbai stories. Korde’s father walked to Mumbai from Ahmednagar in the 1920s, fleeing the plague. At 15, Korde lost his father but managed to stay in school until the seventh standard before finding a job in the administrative department of DS School in Sion. Khan came to Mumbai in 1978 from Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh. After six months of selling bananas, he bought himself a sewing machine and 30 years later, Khan is the proud owner of a store in Dharavi called Campus Shirts. Although they live ten minutes away from each other, it took the riots of ’92-’93 to bring Korde and Khan together. The violence killed scores of people in the neighbourhood and left a moat of suspicion in its wake. “I still remember seeing the chawl next to me burning and wondering why this was happening,” said Korde. “That’s when I realised I did not have a single Muslim friend in the area.”
Khan and Korde found themselves together at a meeting of the mohalla committees, which were formed in neighbourhoods across the city soon after the riots to give members of different religious groups a forum at which to talk to each other in times of normalcy and during moments of tension. “In Dharavi, where so many people are cramped into a tiny space, you’re almost always neighbours with someone from another religion,” Khan said. “We’d all lived together for so long, so what changed in ’92?”
Korde and Khan began meeting regularly to try to find ways to ensure that the violence would never be repeated. The Hum sab ek hai poster in 1996 was the first of many initiatives they pulled off. “All the boys in the poster are Muslims but none of them agreed to shave their head,” Khan said. “So I got my son to do it. He’s the one dressed like the Hindu pandit.” In 2002, they made a film called Ekta Sandesh, a montage of Hindi films clips in which heroes like Amitabh Bachchan and Dilip Kumar give inspirational speeches about secularism.
Both Korde and Khan agree that the main reason there hasn’t been any large-scale violence in Dharavi since ’93 is the fact that residents have attempted to solve their problems by discussing things themselves. “There will always be people from political parties that will give these fiery speeches intended to provoke,” said Korde. “But when all the action is over, they’ll be gone. We still have to live with each other.”
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