By  CJP Team

Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) has filed an urgent follow-up complaint with the Maharashtra Police and the National Commission for Minorities (NCM), flagging a deeply troubling pattern of communal vigilantism at Malabar Hill, Mumbai — one that has not only continued despite formal complaints, but has escalated into repeated, visible, and material harm to Muslim street vendors.

The complaint, dated December 23, 2025, comes nearly a month after CJP’s initial representation of November 25, 2025, which documented how a politically affiliated individual publicly targeted Muslim vendors through religious profiling, forced identity checks, and inflammatory accusations. The absence of any visible deterrent or corrective action, CJP notes, has emboldened the perpetrator and enabled a series of fresh incidents — transforming hate speech into administrative and police action on the ground.

A pattern, not isolated incidents

At the heart of CJP’s follow-up complaint is a critical assertion: what is unfolding at Malabar Hill is not a series of sporadic outbursts, but a continuing and aggravated course of conduct.

Across multiple dates — November 13, December 6, and December 17, 2025 — the same individual has repeatedly targeted Muslim street vendors by appearance and presumed religious identity, invoking communal conspiracy theories such as “land jihad,” “illegal Aadhaar,” and “national security threats.” Each time, these public accusations were followed by immediate and tangible consequences: removal of vendors’ stalls, disruption of livelihood, and police intervention.

The cumulative effect, the complaint argues, is the systematic conversion of a public marketplace into a site of religious policing — where Muslim citizens are publicly cast as illegal, dangerous, and undeserving of economic survival.

Details of the previous complaint may be read here.

December 6: “Land jihad” and the criminalisation of livelihood

On December 6, 2025, a video widely circulated on social media captured the accused individual publicly accusing Muslim hawkers at Malabar Hill of engaging in “land jihad” — a loaded communal trope that frames ordinary economic activity as covert territorial aggression.

Soon after these statements, the vendors’ stalls were removed and the vendors themselves were handed over to the police.

This story was originally published in cjp.org.in. Read the full story here.