Harsh Mander: Why Indian Muslims live apart

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.

Segregation has long been a normalised feature of urban living, as every Indian town and city is fragmented by class, caste and religion. But within these, although Muslims are more urbanised than other religious groups, and among the most segregated, they generally live in poorer settlements in urban areas, contributing a large proportion of the unorganised, daily wage workforce that perform “the dirtiest and worst paying jobs in the city”.

Why do Muslims, not just the working poor but also rich and middle-class Muslims, tend to live in segregated ghettoes? Some assume that this is a matter of choice, that most Muslims simply choose to live exclusively with people who share their religion and cultural practices. But a number of studies confirm that this is not the case. 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 by 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. Faizan Ahmad, a scholar of equality law at Oxford, is precise when he observes that “Muslims do not choose to live in the ghetto, rather the ‘ghetto’ is created as a result of historical exclusion, due to neglect or outright persecution by the state or organised violence.”

Anthropologist Raphael Susewind finds that the segregation of Muslims is highest in Ahmedabad and Hyderabad, followed by Delhi. Take Delhi. Atikh Rashid evocatively describes how Partition and its aftermath dramatically transformed Delhi into a radically segregated city. In 1947, it was home to a large and thriving Muslim population who formed a third of the city’s mainstream population. It quickly transformed into a city in which most Muslims inhabit crowded unsanitary ghettos. Around 3.3 lakh Muslims migrated to Pakistan, while 5 lakh Hindu and Sikh refugees uprooted from their homes in West Pakistan made Delhi their new home. The census revealed that the Muslims of Delhi formed 33.33% of the population in 1941. But their share in the city’s populace fell drastically to only 5.33% in 1951. Colonies like Chandani Chowk, Khari Baoli and Karol Bagh that used to be predominantly Muslim now instead had a majority of Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs.

How did this happen? The Hindu and Sikh refugees in Delhi who had forever lost their homeland and loved ones in Pakistan were smouldering with revenge and rage, which spurred ferocious bloodletting. It is estimated that between August-October 1947, 20,000 Delhi Muslims were killed in communal riots in Muslim localities like Churiwalan, Phatak Habash Khan, Faiz Bazaar, Lal Kuan, and Kucha Chelan, and in “mixed” settlements like Paharganj, Karol Bagh, and Sabzi Mandi.

The result of this bloodbath was that almost every Muslim resident, especially in mixed neighbourhoods, shifted to temporary camps that had sprung up in Purana Qila, Nizamuddin and Humayun’s Tomb. Here they awaited trains to take them to Pakistan.

Mahatma Gandhi and Maulana Azad reached out to them with ardent pleas to stay on in India. On October 23, 1947, Maulana Azad spoke to a huge crowd from the ramparts of Delhi’s Jama Masjid. He declared that Delhi had been nurtured with the blood of their forefathers, that Indian Muslims were their “worthy inheritors” and that this was their country from which they should not feel compelled to flee. Mahatma Gandhi similarly assured Muslims that soon the hatred between the Hindus and Muslims would be over and harmony would be restored. He declared, like Azad, that “India belongs to you and you belong to India”.

Many Indian Muslims heeded their impassioned appeals. But for their own safety, the government did not arrange for them to return to the religiously mixed habitations of the past, but instead resettled them in predominantly Muslim localities such as Pul Bangash, Phatak Habash Khan, Sadar Bazar and Pahari Imli, areas that were described in government parlance as “Muslim Zones”. Even Nehru supported this approach as he felt it would secure their safety and communal peace. Nazma Parveen observes that “For Muslims staying in these ilaqe (areas) this was not a matter of choice; nor were these enclaves celebrated zones of culture. Instead, living in these areas became a compulsion for Muslims for safety”. The Muslim Zones soon gained the stigma of being “communally sensitive” and “zones of trouble”. As decades passed, these became stigmatised as hotbeds of crime, and then as terrorist hideouts.

The first decade and a half of India’s freedom was a period of relative communal peace. But beginning with the Jabalpur riots of 1961, India has been continuously rocked by communal violence. Each episode of violence spurs Muslims further to seek the safety of the ghetto, thereby exacerbating their demographic segregation..

The committee appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to enquire into the condition of Muslims headed by Justice Sachar observed in its report of 2006 that “Fearing for their security, Muslims are increasingly resorting to living in ghettos across the country. This is more pronounced in communally sensitive towns and cities.” As Sara Alter reports, “During what is reported as ‘riots’, the minority Muslim population is cornered and subsequently, forced to migrate in large numbers, to mohallas in older and poorer parts of the city”. She speaks of population movements in cities where recurrent incidents of communal violence compelled Muslims to abandon their homes, their property and businesses in mixed settlements, and move instead to Muslim ghettoes.

This population movement may appear to be “voluntary,” but as migration scholar Dipti Nagaul rightly points out, “it is, in reality, a coerced response to the state’s failure to protect its citizens, forcing them to seek safety on their own”. It is painful memories of loved ones cruelly slaughtered, of sexual violence, of homes and businesses looted and burned down that coerce the survivors to abandon their homes. Typically, they move to inner-city older overcrowded habitations or “the outskirts of cities that lack proper infrastructure”, characterised by “inadequate housing, poor sanitation and limited access to clean water,” disrupted education and scarce healthcare, and crushed livelihoods.

We will consider three examples of this. 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 nine lakh according to the 2011 census.

Ahmedabad, as I observed earlier, is the Indian city most segregated on communal lines. Juhapura is a massive Muslim ghetto with a population of about three lakh Muslim residents. This is as much as half of the 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.

I recall a conversation with the daughter of Ehsan Jafri, former Member of Parliament, that her first childhood memory was of her father carrying her to safety during the 1969 riots when their home was destroyed. Many friends urged him to move into a Muslim-majority ghetto, but he was adamant in his refusal. “Everything I believe in would no longer make sense if I feel I cannot live with safety and trust among my Hindu neighbours”, he declared. This decision was to cost him his life decades later, during the 2002 communal carnage when he was brutally slaughtered in the mixed neighbourhood that he continued to live in.

The extensive population redistribution that occurred after the February 2020 communal clashes in north-east 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.

Newslaundry 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 there, for the sense of safety of living close to other Muslims. Some Hindu residents complained that the colony was becoming “more Muslim”. A local leader claimed that now Muslims “comprise 40% of the population” and he blamed it on “Rohingyas and Bangladeshis”. Some residents spoke privately that the purchase of properties by Muslims was a matter of concern to them. Others were more explicit in claiming that the neighbourhood used to be 90% Hindu, but the presence of Muslims had grown and even a mosque has been erected. “Everybody is looking for a way out,” a Hindu resident said. They are moving out “not because of hostility. We have lived peacefully. All my immediate neighbours are Muslims. But the riots had an impact on our minds. We thought it’s better to live somewhere else – if not today, then tomorrow.”

It is not as though religiously homogenised neighbourhoods do not have other fissures. Class and caste are robust staples of Indian social life, and are not obliterated in a community of people who have come together to escape hate violence and discrimination. Sara Ather notes 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. One Imaad Hassan 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. Every day there is a new hate crime against Muslims. Every day we learn how much we are being hated in our own country.”

Anecdotally, over many years, I have heard literally hundreds of stories from young Muslims, including those I have worked with, of how arduous, painful, humiliating and most often doomed were their attempts to rent rooms and apartments in mixed neighbourhoods in cities. 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 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. (These are what Newslaundry describes as “pimped up ghettoes”). 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.

A study titled the Housing Discrimination Project led by law scholar Mohsin Alam Bhat studied housing discrimination based on 340 detailed interviews over three years in Delhi and Mumbai. Their conclusions were stark, that “in India’s most diverse and ostensibly cosmopolitan cities, neighbourhoods continue to keep Muslims and Dalits out. Home owners and cooperative housing societies refuse to rent them apartments. Discrimination in housing has become so commonplace that it is practically hidden in plain sight”.

The study found that most prospective tenants rely on brokers. The brokers the researchers interviewed were mostly candid in conceding that they tend to refuse Muslim tenants. Some revealed their own biases, but others explained that Muslim tenants could be a “liability”. Years of experience had taught them that landlords just do not accept Muslim tenants, which is why so many openly refuse to work with them at all. A broker estimated that this was true for 90% of all brokers. They don’t want to waste time on clients who would not be “open” to Muslim tenants. Some brokers refuse Muslims simply by saying that houses are only for “veg families” “Others show their hesitation by causing delays or not responding.” Religion, brokers observed – much like a tenant’s budget – is a fundamental constraint.

A broker in Mumbai, who does work with Muslim tenants, said he would look for “a Muslim landlord for a Muslim tenant, then a Christian, and finally a samajhdaar (sensible) Hindu”. “Even in cosmo neighbourhoods” – cosmopolitan areas being a common reference to mixed localities – “where a Muslim is willing to pay, landlords are unwilling to rent.” Even upper-class Muslim tenants of pedigree who are willing to pay more than the market rate can be refused because “prejudice often trumps class”.

“The right way to refuse people,” said an experienced broker in Mumbai’s Chembur, a suburb to the city’s north-east, “is by bringing the question down to vegetarian and non-vegetarian.” He simply tells tenants that he only has houses for “veg families”. “We are being denied spaces on the pretext of being meat eaters or on the assumption of being too aggressive or conservative,” Arif Ahmad, an intern at a Delhi-based law firm, confirmed to The Caravan.

Those who directly speak with landlords report that once they see their Muslim name in their documents, they back out. “The usual stuff. Someone went to see a house, went upstairs and, as soon as the introductions happened and names were exchanged, the broker stopped showing flats.” All of this makes “the ordinary task of finding a house unending, exhausting and deeply humiliating”. A young Muslim woman said, echoing doctoral scholar Rohith Vemula in the letter he scribbled before he took his life, that “I felt reduced to my immediate identity...” Every time she crosses the house where she was rejected, she wonders “Why?”

A discouraging finding of the research was “the profound and widespread feeling that Muslims were not welcome outside the so-called Muslim localities”. As a result, “Muslim tenants … consistently said they were aware of housing discrimination against Muslims and felt there was no point even trying to find a home in some areas”.

The refusal by Hindus to live alongside Muslims is no longer restricted to a polite (or even peremptory) refusal by landlords and builders to rent or sell apartments to them. On occasion, residents have begun to actively demand that Muslims leave their settlement in a form of low-intensity ethnic cleaning, or vociferously protest if Muslims seek to live in their neighbourhoods.

About a dozen Muslim families fled Purola, a small Himalayan town in Uttarakhand midsummer in 2023. This they did after notices from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal appeared glued on homes and shops demanding that they vacate the town, claiming that a Muslim man had tried to abduct a young Hindu girl. It did not matter that the courts later found that the allegations were entirely false.

Similarly, more than two dozen Muslim families fled from Borlay village of Barwani district in Madhya Pradesh, after a Muslim man allegedly eloped with a Hindu girl. The dominant Hindu Patidar community attacked and vandalised several Muslim homes and painted signs disallowing namaz and the azan. The Muslim residents felt they had no future in the village of their birth[25].

Residents of a housing society in Harni in Vadodara rose in protest after a Muslim woman was allotted a flat there by the local administration under the official Mukhyamantri Awas Yojana. 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 area is a Hindu-dominated peaceful area and there is no settlement of Muslims in the periphery of about four kilometres. It is like setting fire to the peaceful life of 461 families.”

Most recently, residents of a Hindu-majority housing colony in Uttar Pradesh’s Moradabad launched a protest after a Hindu houseowner sold his apartment to a Muslim doctor. They claimed that this sale “violated social harmony”, adding that “We live here peacefully and there was never any issue before” because there were no earlier Muslim residents among the 450 apartments in the colony. They lodged complaints with the district administration and local police, demanding that the sale be cancelled. Finally, the Muslim doctor couple gave up their claim to this home.

An irony is that the law itself is being used in many states to promote segregation of Muslims. In 1991, the Gujarat legislature passed the Disturbed Areas Act, 1991. This authorises the state government to declare riot-prone urban areas as ‘disturbed’. The consequence of this notification was that every land sale required prior approval by the district collector. The law was designed to prevent distress sales, which had become rampant after a series of communal clashes in the 1980s and 1990s. This same law is now being weaponised almost exclusively to prevent Muslims from buying properties in Hindu-dominated areas. The law was amended in 2010 giving the local administration greater authority in regulating inter-community sales of property. In July 2019, the punishment for such transfers was further enhanced. Violations of the law are punishable with up to six years’ imprisonment. This amendment authorised the district collector to ascertain whether a transfer of property disturbs the demographic equilibrium of a disturbed area and increases the likelihood of “improper clustering of persons belonging to one community in the area”. The Gujarat high court stayed the amendments in 2021 and ordered the state government not to issue notifications under it, but the Disturbed Areas Act continues to be used to ensure religious segregation.

Faizan Ahmad, research scholar from Oxford observes that both Hindutva groups and radicalised Hindu residents pressure the state government to use the law to notify more and more urban enclaves as “disturbed”. They then protest the purchase of properties in Hindu dominated areas by Muslims, claiming discomfort in living next to meat-eaters and alleging law and order problems. Their overall aim is “to maintain the ‘purity’ of upper caste Hindu localities”. Very far from its original intention, the way that this law has been used has led commentators to compare this to the racial restrictive statutes and rules regulating the buying of property that were used to ensure racial segregation in the United States.

Another law that has facilitated religious segregation is the Enemy Property Act enacted in 1968. It sought to empower the state to regulate and take possession of real estate that belonged to people who had left India and got citizenship of countries India has gone to war with. These are Pakistan and China. An amendment of the law in 2017 expanded the meaning of the term “enemy subject”, and “enemy firm” to include legal heirs and successors of an ‘enemy’, whether citizens of India or citizens of a country which is not an enemy. It is also clarified that once a property is declared ‘enemy property’, it will remain so. There are 12,611 enemy properties across the country, out of which 126 belong to Chinese citizens. The rest all belonged originally to people who migrated to Pakistan and what later became Bangladesh. The right to these properties will not accrue to their heirs even if they are Indian citizens. The result is that many Muslims are being evicted from properties that they have occupied, most of all in the states of Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

Being coerced into living in ghettos is destructive first of the access of the Muslim residents to decent public services and social integration. This was noted by the Sachar Committee which reported “Muslims living together in concentrated pockets (both because of historical reasons and a deepening sense of insecurity) has made them easy targets for neglect by municipal and government authorities. Water, sanitation, electricity, schools, public health facilities, banking facilities, anganwadis, ration shops, roads, and transport facilities – are all in short supply in these areas”.

Race-based residential segregation has been studied for decades in the US. These studies supply robust evidence that segregation of communities is a powerful deterrent to the upward socio-economic mobility of segregated communities, particularly of the Black population. Farzana Afridi in the Indian Express observes fittingly that “Segregation not only makes minority communities easier targets during communal violence, it has strong negative implications for access to public goods and services”.

An extensive study of 1.5 million highly localised neighbourhoods of 700 people each in urban and rural India found settlements of Indian Muslims to be systematically disadvantaged in public services. These are less likely to have public schools, clinics, sewerage, water supply and closed drains than non-Muslim areas. This was reported in a paper titled “Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India”, by Sam Asher (Imperial College, London), Kritarth Jha (Development Data Lab), Anjali Adukia (University of Chicago), Paul Novosad (Dartmouth College) and Brandon Tan (International Monetary Fund). The study found the inequality in public service provision to be more systematic than they anticipated.

Segregation is one of the most important contributors to persistent racial inequality in the United States where Black Americans have remained under-served with public services even 150 years after the end of slavery, Novosad, professor of economics at Dartmouth College said to Article 14. In both the US and in South Africa, the “poisonous legacy” of residential segregation results even today in the low standards of socio-economic opportunities and upward mobility of Black populations. This is because their poor housing conditions and low access to public services like education and health are barriers to better employment opportunities and, therefore, to their capabilities to improve their economic status. Their study revealed that the denial was similar for Muslims and Dalits in India. “Indians of all social classes are very comfortable with segregation and the belief that social groups are better off if they keep to themselves – too comfortable,” Novosad told Article 14. Singapore offers an instructive contrast. There 80% of the population resides in public housing in which state policy ensures an equitable mix of the three ethnic groups of Chinese, Indians and Malays through quotas.

The India research project found that government-supplied public services were less likely to be found in neighbourhoods with high numbers of Muslims or Dalits. This was the case for almost every service the researchers could measure, including secondary schools, clinics and hospitals, electricity, water and sewerage. A 100% Muslim locality was 10% less likely to have piped water infrastructure and 50% less likely to have a secondary school as compared to a non-Muslim neighbourhood. For public schools and health-centres, the disadvantage in Muslim neighbourhoods is double the disadvantage even in Dalit neighbourhoods. A child growing up in a 100% Muslim neighbourhood can expect to obtain two fewer years of education than a child growing up in a 0% Muslim neighbourhood.

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”. Kashif-Ul-Huda, Editor-in-Chief of TwoCircles.net, worries that “…Hindus and Muslims are getting ghettoised in their communities. It is a disturbing trend for the future of plural India.” Journalist Anurabh Saikia adds “The veneer of Delhi’s cosmopolitanism (and he could add, that of all our metropolises) is falling off – and it’s happening in such a surreptitious fashion that we can all claim ignorance. At our own peril, of course.

Sara Ather writes evocatively of the “psychological ghettoisation” of Muslims in which the spaces for interaction and friendship of people of diverse communities decreases drastically. “Generations of Muslims and Hindus now growing up together in segregated islands in the same city,” she observes, “whose only contact with each other is through uncertain glances on the street or through a state-controlled media that actively distorts the reality … to promote the stereotypical image of the unsociable and criminally profiled Muslim”.

I end with a poignant lament by Mohsin Alam Bhat. He grieves that the systematic expulsion of Indian Muslims from rental housing in Hindu-majority neighbourhoods reminds Muslims every day “of who belongs, and who does not”.

The Indian constitution had pledged to build a country of equal belonging for people of every faith, caste and identity. But in the ways Indians live their lives – the ways in which people of the majority religion and privileged castes continue to expel Dalits and Muslims from our neighbourhoods, our schools and our lives – Indian cities and Indian villages remain apartheid habitats segregated by overwhelming prejudice.

I am grateful for research support from Omair Khan.

Harsh Mander, justice and peace worker and writer, leads Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s campaign to counter hate violence with love and solidarity. He teaches at FAU University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Heidelberg University, Germany; Vrije University, Amsterdam; and IIM, Ahmedabad.