How Muslim ghettoisation risks turning India into a country of strangers

Razia Siddiqui is a physiotherapist with a leading South Delhi clinic, Sajida Hussain works for a private bank, Huma Ali runs the customer care services of a foreign car dealership, Mohammad Shahid heads after-sales of an electronics goods firm.They are among a group of 30-something educated and aspirational Muslim men and women (names have been changed to protect their identity) I happened to meet in the past few months in the course of random dealings with various private companies.It was good to see these young Muslims doing well, especially girls, contrary to the stereotype of an army of uneducated and unemployable Mussalmans drifting into extremism.Despite reports of widespread anti-Muslim discrimination in private-sector jobs, here were these ordinary Muslims from middle- and lower-middle-class families employed by some of the country’s top private firms.Full marks to them (the firms, I mean) for their bias-free and professional recruitment policies, and good on these young Muslims.But my elation was somewhat dampened on discovering that for all their apparent upwardly mobile career graph, almost all of them lived in Delhi’s slummy ghettos.Between them, they came mainly from Jamia Nagar, Zakir Bagh, Shaheen Bagh, Basti Nizamuddin and Matia Mahal, Old Delhi.Looking at these confident, English-speaking and smartly dressed lot, it was hard to imagine them willingly living in crowded, unhygienic and segregated neighbourhoods rather than alongside other communities in cleaner and more mixed environments.And I couldn’t resist asking them.Except for one (a newly-married sales manager) who said he couldn’t afford to live independently on his salary and was therefore stuck with his Jama Masjid-based joint family, others cited two reasons: they felt more secure among fellow Muslims in the prevailing communally charged climate, and the difficulty in renting in non-Muslim neighbourhoods.“Nobody wants to give their house to a Muslim” was a dominant sentiment.Well, “nobody” might be stretching it a bit. Much like the narrative that “nobody” gives jobs to Muslims. My own experience is that no sensible employer who cares for their business would reject a meritorious candidate simply on the basis of religious bias.When I was aspiring to be a reporter, I was warned that I had little chance: first I was a Muslim, and second I had a bad limp. That was a double whammy.A limping Muslim reporter? Smell the coffee, dear boy.In the event, I ended up working in some of the country’s biggest newspapers — including one which had the reputation of hiring only high-caste Tamil Brahmins.Let alone Muslims, even non-Brahmin Hindus were apparently not welcome. So, good luck, I was told.Today, of course, the media is flush with Muslim journalists. And not just the media.Muslims are no longer confined to traditional professions like hair-cutting, tailoring, car repairs, teaching, nursing and social care.Call a bank helpline, visit a hospital, go to a hotel, a club — and you are likely to find yourself being served by a Muslim, increasingly a woman.So, the problem, it seems, is not so much anti-Muslim discrimination, even though it undoubtedly exists, as the fact that most Muslims turned down for jobs are simply not good enough and use “discrimination” as an excuse to cover up their unemployability.A former Muslim resident editor of an English-language daily once told me that when he took over, he decided to address the issue.So, when the paper was looking for a sports reporter, he personally screened all Muslim applications to make sure that no anti-Muslim bias crept in.But to his dismay few were worthy of a second look. He still managed to shortlist two with Muslim-sounding names — only to discover that both (Bakhtayar and Adel) were actually Parsis!“That settled it for me — for good!” he said. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/aEd64XSIyy8?si=TTVCWAc8Ef7wZCInThis is not to deny anti-Muslim discrimination (all minorities the world over suffer bias), but to make the point that it’s often exaggerated.But it’s very different with housing.It has always been extremely hard for Muslims to rent a house, at least in Delhi.Back in the 1970s and ’80s, I was turned down by innumerable landlords, including at least two fellow journalists, on various pretexts — the most common being that they had conservative parents who would prefer a vegetarian tenant.Things have gotten worse in recent years and, to be honest, now Muslims find themselves up against an undeclared housing apartheid.No wonder, an overwhelming majority of Delhi’s Muslims live in dozen-odd ghettos dotted across the capital stretching from Old Delhi’s mohallas to slums of East Delhi and more well-off new settlements in the south.According to a real estate agent, the boom started after the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi when Muslims noticed that most of the atrocities happened in areas where Sikhs were not living together.However, what’s often forgotten in this scramble for “safety in numbers” is that in the event of a riot, such areas can become easy targets of attack — as happened during the 2002 anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat and 1984 anti-Sikh killings in Delhi.This is the second cycle of Muslim ghettoisation in Delhi after independence. The first happened in the immediate aftermath of Partition riots when many Muslims fled their mixed neighbourhoods to ‘safer’ Muslim-dominant areas in the Walled City.Thus I grew up in Ballimaran, Chandni Chowk. It was a hard grind. The agony of living amid filthy and stinking open drains was compounded by the insularity and misogyny of fundamentalist mullahs who ran the area as their personal fiefdom. So, by the 1960s, most educated Muslims started to move out.My parents moved to newly-built government flats in South Delhi — and we found living with culturally diverse communities hugely liberating.Meanwhile, DDA’s multi-storeyed flats — available for anyone with enough funds to buy — proved a big unifier.The 1960s and ’70s were an important era in integrated living.Fifty years later, it’s back to the ghettos. And in a more intense form.Instead of becoming a more integrated society, we have become a more segregated one.Ghettoisation of Muslims is reported to be happening in other big cities also, including the once enviably cosmopolitan Mumbai.Thane district of Maharashtra is home to India’s largest Muslim ghetto, Mumbra, to which Muslims from different parts of Mumbai fled and settled after the 1992 communal riots.Segregated housing is a slippery slope to segregation in other areas such as schools. “Hindu classrooms”? “Muslim classrooms”?And who knows the DDA might be tempted by the prevailing zeitgeist to introduce separate Hindu and Muslim blocks of flats.In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in the number of Hindus and Muslims living “parallel” lives — as in many Western immigrant societies facing issues around integration.British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s warning that at this rate Britain risks becoming an “island of strangers” holds good for us too, I’m afraid.Read more from the author here.