Muslims only, please: Why the Noida housing society is no ghetto

When news emerged that a builder in the Sports City area of Greater Noida was offering flats hoping to create a “Muslims only”  community, it provoked immediate comment across the ideological spectrum.

Among the features being offered by the builder include: “a mosque, a madrassa, and will face Qibla - the direction a Muslim faces when offering prayers” and while the builder justified it as a means for the Muslim residents to experience a “best-in-class living experience”, on Twitter it acquired an entirely different colour.

Muslim only apartments coming up in Noida ! What is next ? Shariah Zones ? http://t.co/ztdyKKAXLr

— Nationalizer🇮🇳 (@nationalizer) September 7, 2014

But some like former Hindu editor Siddharth Varadarajan – in a flurry of tweets –  pointed out that while in this case the advertising was blatant, housing colonies meant for specific communities are not a new phenomenon with Hindu castes already having similar colonies and called instead for a law to enforce anti-discriminatory housing for all communities: “When ghettoisation is imposed on Muslims, especially middle class Muslims, unscrupulous builders will obviously try and profit from this 3/7. Hindutva guys are hypocritical to oppose “Muslim only” housing while silently cheering the rampant ’no Muslim’ housing policy in cities. Also, please notice how Hindutva supporters don’t get angry with “Brahmins only” housing projects… Concusion: India needs strong anti-discriminatory legislation for housing market to end the enforced and growing ghettoisation we see.”

Writing in the Mint , columnist Salil Tripathi also argues that the Noida project is the consequence of the fact that Muslims face bias in the rental and real estate market  in urban India, writing: “This is of course a good business opportunity. If Muslims aren’t welcome in parts of urban India, they will live in their own complexes, creating new walled cities. If one side builds its enclave, the other will build its own. And thus we divide, debilitate, diminish, and dehumanize ourselves, eventually segregating ourselves into apartheid-era like ghettos.”

That Muslims face discrimination in the housing market is a shameful and inarguable fact. But is that what the Noida housing project about? Is it correct to compare these luxury homes to those being offered to residents of the Juhapura area of Ahmedabad where 2002 riot refugees are thrown together, living cheek by jowl without sanitation or electricity? Surely, a better parallel would be to a Parsi colony or even that Brahmin-only housing society.

Across India, communities have voluntarily come together to set up societies for their ilk and restrict the entry of others. This cuts across caste and religion with even a traditionally ‘cosmopolitan city’ like Mumbai. Mumbai has had housing colonies specific to the Jain, Gujarati, Parsi and other even Muslim communities. Few of them are ghettos but instead reflect the choice of members of a community to live together, restricting the entry of ‘others’.

However, the argument that cosmopolitan nature of urban areas in the west is due to ethnic enclaves is a flawed one. Manhattan may be richer thanks to Chinatown, but the history of precinct is hardly a pleasant one with the area arising out of Chinese immigrants living together in an attempt to evade racial discrimination. Other ethnic areas that have arisen in cities like New York and London also didn’t rise out of a desire to further the cosmopolitan nature of the city but often because they found safety in numbers. If anything, the Juhapura area of Gujarat may be a closer approximation to them than the Noida project.

In fact, the Little Italys and Chinatowns  of the West – which Tripathi cites approvingly as “largely organic” – where spurred by discrimination against newly arrived immigrants who were forced to live together in less desirable parts of the city. That they now have become a symbol of multiculturalism does little to erase the fact that a Japantown in San Francisco carried a shameful history of World War 2 internment.

The housing society in Noida has none of the characteristics that are typical of a ghetto or coercion. The building is high end, it is entirely up to a buyer to buy into the project and isn’t necessarily because he can’t find housing anywhere else. There will be Muslims who find the thought of living with their own comforting, while others may see it as limiting – much as Brahmins, or Jains or Parsis. If they do choose to do so, they won’t be any different than many fellow Indians. The very fact of the Noida housing society is hardly a reason for alarm or despair.  The discrimination minorities face in buildings that supposedly open to all, however, is a different matter.