The limits of intolerance

The state can mandate ways for Indians to live together

Last week, the police booked 11 people in a housing society in the Mumbai suburb of Vasai for preventing the sale of an apartment to a Muslim. At a time when Hindutva-inspired social vigilantism is seriously straining public notions of tolerance in multi-cultural India, it is worth celebrating this little-publicised action. The police had a strong case in this particular instance because several members of the housing society concerned had sent a written resolution to the owner of the apartment - a Hindu - stating that selling the apartment to a Muslim would harm the "society's atmosphere in the future". It is worth noting also, that the Muslim buyer had sought a no-objection certificate from the society before he raised a loan to buy the one-bedroom apartment in anticipation of precisely this sort of opposition. The certificate, which the seller submitted to the local police station, enabled the police to book the objectors under Sections 295 and 298 of the Indian Penal Code, which cover injury to religious feelings and insult to religion.

Such prompt action by the police, however, is a rarity where the practice of excluding Muslims from residential properties in overt and covert ways - vegetarianism being one popular ruse - has been standard practice. The practice of denying flats on rent or sale to Muslims, and sometimes to non-vegetarians, is widespread, and not just in Mumbai, but also in Delhi and elsewhere. In May this year, a study by the Helsinki-based United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research revealed the shameful fact that Muslim applicants find it more difficult to rent a house in the National Capital Region. Among the several depressing statistics in this survey, which was conducted over the summer of 2015, one stood out: that Muslims need to respond to 45 listings to receive 10 landlord call-backs compared with 28.6 per cent for an upper caste Hindu. Though the study was limited to the NCR, variations of this furtive form of discrimination could apply to any city in India.

The dangers of this exclusionary mentality have been starkly in evidence in Ahmedabad, where riots in 1969 - the worst since Partition - and the caste-cum-communal unrest of the 1980s saw an acceleration of segregation and ghettoisation, which reached their peak after 2002. The enclave of Juhapura, where former judges and bureaucrats are forced to live in the same locality as the poorest of the poor in an isolated pocket of the city with sparing public facilities, remains a grim contradiction to the assimilative society that the Constitution had envisaged. The fact that the state does little to contradict these proclivities has enhanced the process of intolerance that is convulsing Indian society today. As the political scientist Ashutosh Varshney had argued in his 2013 book Battle Half Won: India's Improbable Democracy, such cultural divides and ghetto mentalities make communal riots more likely.

The short point is that Indians need to learn to live together and, when societal attitudes militate against it, it is the government's duty to leverage its constitutional mandate and the plethora of legal instruments at its disposal to do so. For instance, since the government seems inclined to take advice from Singapore (its deputy prime minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam was recently invited by the Niti Aayog to deliver a lecture on the 'Transforming India' initiative), it may take note of the fact that the city-state enforced racial non-discrimination in its housing board developments, where 80 per cent of its population lives. The city-state, which has a Muslim population percentage that is about the same as India's 14 per cent, has ensured that that the pork-eating Chinese live in the same apartment blocks as pork-abhorring Muslims as well as people of Indian origins whose oil- and spice-laden cooking smells can be off-putting for some. In a small way, the officials of Palghar police station, Vasai, have shown how this can be achieved.