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Hyderabad, the capital city of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, witnessed communal tensions since 1938. In the recent past, there has been a series of communal riots in 1990, 1992, 1993, 1998, 2002 and 2003 which has lead to the climate of mistrust and fear among the Hindu and Muslim communities, especially in those areas where both the communities reside together.
Communal clashes resulted in the loss of human life, property and social system,
that paved the way for the division of communities on religious lines, misunderstandings, broken relationships and hatred for each other. Therefore the situation brought in the need for healing and restoring relationships and long term interventions for promoting friendships across the faith barriers.
In 1990, in the wake of communal riots in the Old City of Hyderabad, HMI facilitated the establishment of the ‘Aman Shanti Forum’, a people's movement consisting of like-minded socially responsible citizens from different religious backgrounds. The forum aimed at promoting peace through reconciliation and healing processes. During that period HMI undertook relief work as an immediate intervention to communal riots, and brought together people from the divided Hindu and Muslim communities of Old City of Hyderabad.
This was the moment when HMI initiated the Praxis programmes. Initially HMI started off by laying the foundation to its grass root community development work in the year 1996 in Sultan Shahi, the most sensitive area of the Old City and the worst affected during the 1990 communal violence. Later HMI started similar projects in Shankar Nagar and Chandrayangutta areas of Old City in 2000 and 2003 respectively. These projects are called 'Aman Shanti Community Centres' (Aman is an Arabic / Urdu word, which means peace, and Shanti is a Hindi / Telugu word which also means peace). These centres were established in order to promote HMI's commitment to addressing community's economic, social, cultural, and political needs as an essential part of the process of building sustainable peace.
In these centres, HMI conducts a range of programmes for the Hindu and Muslim community members, based on their needs / interests. Capacity building trainings are organized to empower them and improve their leadership skills, in order to help them take the ownership of the programme and sustain peace in the communities. |
