India’s Muslim Ghettos

“I wish the world wasn’t so polarized.” “I wish my country was less polarized.” These are oft-heard remarks.

Is the world’s chief problem a failure to find the middle ground? A refusal to give-and-take? Clinging to extreme positions? 

This is doubtless the case with a great many conflicts, disputes and disagreements. If instead of gravitating to one pole or to its opposite, people were to position themselves elsewhere on the large ground in between, many of our disputes would surely end more quickly and with less damage. 

Conflicts over wages and incomes, over taxes and tariffs, or over best ways of reducing budgetary deficits are certainly resolved more easily when moderates are as assertive as extremists. Or when there is conversation and even friendship across the political aisle. Or when the Left is a wide spectrum, and the Right as well, and there is conversation among Leftists, among Rightists, and between Leftists and Rightists. 

“OUR TENT” & “THEIR TENT” 

I have merely spelled out truisms. Another truth about our world today, a most relevant and different truth, is the resurgence of tribalism, a return to our traditional “tent”, to our ethnic, racial or religious “home”. There may be a likeable element in wishing to return to the ways of our elders, who were not always wrong. Often, in fact, they were wise. Trouble looms, however, when love for my tent -- for my traditional home -- is joined to a heightened dislike for the tents of others, in fact to a dislike of the others. 

This dislike for “them” and “their tents”, sometimes rising to hatred and contempt, is our 21st century story. 

And what happens when in a diverse country people divide themselves into separate worlds and physically live in separate ghettos? Harsh Mander, a tireless scholar who was also a gifted civil servant for the government of India, and who in recent years has been leading a movement known as Karwan e Mohabbat (Caravan of Love), describes India’s increasing ghettoization, which may be a more serious reality than polarization.

Below are extensive quotes, taken from Mander’s personal website, from an article he originally wrote for the online portal, Scroll.in:

“An inescapable feature of India’s urban geography is the Muslim ghetto: densely crowded habitations strewn with garbage, with potholed narrow lanes and open drains and conspicuously underserved with public services like schools and hospitals, sewerage, water and electricity supply.

“Why do Muslims, not just the working poor but also rich and middle-class Muslims, tend to live in segregated ghettos? [Often] Muslims are actively excluded, even expelled, from mixed neighbourhoods. The driver may be the memories of the experience of communal violence, or fear. Or it may be the routine reluctance of non-Muslims to sell or rent homes to people of Muslim identity, aided further in many states by exclusionary laws and state policies…

THICKENING GHETTO 

“Mumbra, on the outskirts of Mumbai, was a small habitation of a community of Konkani Muslims. After the Mumbai riots of 1992-93, Muslims from habitations in Mumbai where they were a minority migrated to Mumbra, raising its population spectacularly from 40,000 at that time to over 900,000 according to the 2011 census.

“Ahmedabad (Gujarat’s largest town) is the Indian city most segregated on communal lines. Juhapura is a massive Muslim ghetto with a population of about 300,000 Muslim residents. This is as much as half of the [entire] Muslim population of Ahmedabad. Ahmedabad has seen a series of major communal riots, including in 1969, 1985 and 2002. Especially from 1985, and on an even larger scale in 2002, Juhapura (often called pejoratively “mini-Pakistan”) became the destination of masses of Muslim citizens fearful of living in mixed colonies with their Hindu neighbours…

“The extensive population redistribution that occurred after the February 2020 communal clashes in northeast Delhi is a recent instructive example of the separations and segregations that riots spur. My colleagues from the Karwan e Mohabbat, who work closely with the survivors of the 2020 violence, report a widespread reorganisation of populations on religious lines in what used to be a closely-knit mixed colony. 

“Hindus and Muslims lived side by side as neighbours, and Hindus would freely rent their properties to Muslims and vice versa. Now, this has conspicuously changed. People are hesitant to rent their properties to people of the other faith, and residents are choosing to rent or buy properties in locations which have a dense presence of people of their religion.

STORY OF NORTHEAST DELHI 

“Newslaundry (an online portal) investigated a set of posters that appeared early in 2023 on the walls of Brahmpuri, a locality in northeast Delhi that was hit by communal riots in February 2020. These posters urged Hindus not to sell their homes to Muslims. Brahmpuri stands opposite Jaffarabad, a Muslim-dominated area. After the riots, many Muslims began to buy houses in Jaffarabad, for the sense of safety of living close to other Muslims.

“Sara Ather notes that a prominent feature of modern Muslim ghettos is the presence within it of the Muslim middle class. These are people who could afford to live in upmarket areas with upper-caste Hindu neighbours. They do not do this either because fear stalks them, or because – as we shall see – Hindu landowners refuse to rent or sell their houses to Muslims. These ghettos therefore typically combine economic heterogeneity with ethnic homogeneity.

“Sometimes it is fear of anticipated violence in the future that motivates people to move to a ghetto. Imaad Hassan once lived in a posh, Hindu-dominated gated colony, Sarita Vihar, in Delhi that had not seen riots. But he chose to shift to a Muslim ghetto, Abul Fazal Enclave, even though it had poor water and electricity access. He explained, ‘I moved from a gated society to a ghetto for my own safety. Every time the news carried events of Hindu-Muslim clashes, my neighbours would stop responding to my greetings. Only Allah knows what would’ve happened had I continued to stay there.’ 

“Another Muslim man who made a similar choice explains, ‘I don’t dress Islamically, so I could manage somehow, but my wife is a practicing Muslim who wears the hijab. It would be difficult for her to be safe in a Hindu-majority area.’

“YOU’RE NOT WANTED” 

“This is the other major reason for the clustering of most urban Muslim residents into ghettos, simply that it is very hard in contemporary India for them to find landlords, housing societies and property brokers who are willing to rent or sell homes in neighbourhoods and housing societies in which a majority of residents are caste Hindus. This reality has been confirmed by a number of research studies. 

“Two progressive publications, TwoCircles.net and Newslaundry, joined hands to study housing apartheid against Muslims in Delhi. They concluded that it is ‘more (the) norm than deviation in the capital’. They examined the membership records of all 1960 registered housing societies in Delhi. They were startled to find that out of these 1960 registered societies, 1,345 have no Muslim members at all. This means that as many as 68% of the housing societies in Delhi have not a single Muslim member. Muslims form about 13% of Delhi’s population, but their membership in housing societies barely exceeds 3 per cent. Even this data is skewed, because Muslims have resorted to creating their own housing societies. Among the 1960 registered housing societies in Delhi, there are 31 societies that have 90-100% Muslim members and these account for 59% of Muslims in housing societies. This means that only around 1.5% Muslims live in mixed housing societies. 

“Residents of a housing society in Harni in Vadodara (in Gujarat state) rose in protest after a Muslim woman was allotted a flat there by the local administration under [an official scheme]. They jointly petitioned the district collector, the municipal commissioner, the mayor and the commissioner of police in the city, demanding that the allotment of the house be ‘invalidated’. The complaint cited an ‘imminent law-and-order crisis’. The residents wrote: ‘We believe that Harni is a Hindu-dominated peaceful area and there is no settlement of Muslims in the periphery of about four kilometres. [The allotment of a flat there to a Muslim woman] is like setting fire to the peaceful life of 461 families.’ 

WHEN KIDS PLAY TOGETHER 

“Segregation is a huge barrier also to social goodwill and understanding. As Afridi, a professor of economics notes, ‘When families belonging to different communities live next to each other, they not just tolerate each other, but because their children go to the same schools and play in the same grounds, they can form strong bonds that help create more cohesive societies’.” 

I’ve quoted at length from Mander’s important article because it describes a serious reality that is well known but rarely presented in the media. It portrays a major national shortcoming. India’s constitution “guarantees” equality and fraternity, but in crucial areas Indian society shrinks from fraternization. 

Fortunately, helpfulness endures as a strong Indian trait. The elderly invariably find a supporting hand, including from strangers. A Hindu aids a Muslim, and vice versa. The other day I was glad to notice, at Mumbai’s international airport, a customs officer’s spontaneous respect and assistance for an arriving old Muslim. But this precious characteristic only rarely stretches to a fight for equal rights, and makes no dent on, among other things, India’s glaring ghettoization. 

As David Belden writes in his article on this site about the American scene (“The Skills We Need”), it is local groups, no matter how small, that everywhere commence the wider change we hope for. Progressive, liberal and democracy-loving Indians add up to an immense number, but do we take care to ensure that our exertions in our local spaces are joint affairs, with people of different religions and castes taking part? 

Perhaps we have relatives, neighbours, or colleagues who do not share our discomfort with unequal or unfair treatment of minorities. We may dislike their views, but let’s take care not to dislike them. Each of them is a distinct individual. We can appreciate the qualities they have. Let’s not ghetto-ize them in our minds.