The Real Gated Communities: India’s Housing Discrimination Problem

“Imagine that you are a Hindu or a Muslim and you live in such part of America where Christian radicals are very strong. Let’s assume that despite the fact that you an American citizen somebody does not want to rent out a house for you. How would you feel about it? Wouldn’t you feel bad about it? Imagine that if you would complain against this discrimination, in reply you would hear: ‘This is not your country! Go back to India!’ How would you feel about it? Wouldn’t you feel bad about it?”

This is a quote from a class VII social science textbook published by a central government agency in India. While it uses the United States as a hypothetical – or not so hypothetical – parallel, the blade of its criticism is actually aimed at housing discrimination in India. The goals of the textbook are noble: Its narrative strives to raise social awareness and tolerance by, among others, describing cases of discrimination and debunking stereotypes about other communities. If such a problem is flagged by the central government and taught in middle schools, it means it is perceived as a serious issue.

News articles and a number of studies have confirmed the existence of housing discrimination in India; it is sometimes more harshly referred to as “housing apartheid.” In 2017, a UN Special Rapporteur in her report on India recommended that the country’s government, among other things, “enact legislation to curb de facto housing discrimination” and find “specific measures to enforce existing legislation” in this regard.

Representatives of certain communities, as well as particular individuals, have often faced trouble when trying to rent or purchase apartments. While across the globe it is often pointed out that gated communities are a symbol of exclusivism, in India, and likely elsewhere as well, exclusion extends beyond just gated communities. Other areas, both urban and rural, also maintain their own, invisible, social gates, which individuals hit upon when revealing their identity to landowners or developers. While the term “gated community” denotes a secluded neighborhood, it’s much more apt in describing the will of a community, understood as a social group, to be separate from others.

In India, the problem has been most evident for Muslims. Even in some of India’s largest cities, like Mumbai and Delhi, Muslims have reported difficulty in renting or purchasing apartments. One particularly poignant story from 2014, often cited thereafter, involved a cargo ship captain named Zainul Abidin Juvale. Juvale had helped many stranded Indians escape from Kuwait when the country was attacked by Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein’s orders. Years later, Juvale discovered that it was hard for him to find a flat in Mumbai because of the religious community he came from. “Nobody asked me my religion when I risked my life to rescue fellow Indians,” he pointed out.

The issue is a part of a larger process: The growing seclusion of the Muslim minority and ongoing Hindu-Muslim tensions. Followers of Islam also find it increasingly hard to acquire certain jobs in India, including in the public sector. Yet, to be sure, this is not a one-way phenomenon. There are also instances of Muslim areas preferring to hire or sell flats only to their coreligionists. Some of the more recent cases include advertisements of new “Muslim only” apartments in places like Noida, a suburb of Delhi. That housing discrimination against Muslims is much more noticeable than discrimination imposed by some Muslim communities is perhaps connected to the fact that India’s middle and upper classes consist mostly of people from Hindu communities, and therefore there would be fewer instances of well-off, Muslim-dominated areas.

Housing discrimination extends beyond a simple Hindi-Muslim divide as well. Some housing communities prefer vegetarians only, a choice that will often overlap with a selection of some of India’s Hindu higher castes. After all, cuisine in India is not just a lifestyle and health-related choice, but traditionally a part of caste and religious identity. Thus, when asking about a person’s name and whether they are a vegetarian, the landlords, agents, and developers may also gain other facts by assumption that may lead to refusal.

In one of the perhaps more rare – but also more striking – cases, a “township” under construction in Bangalore shared an advertisement that its residential plots were for sale to people “irrespective of sects, sub-sects, sampradaya [religious community], traditions affiliations or linguistic groups” but insisted that the buyers were from the Brahmin community (the class that traditionally consisted of Hindu priests and is perceived as one of the top rungs of the society).

It’s not only religious communities and castes that have met with refusal when looking for accommodation. Single women or single men, or even people of certain professions, have been refused housing on the basis that their lifestyle is deemed indecent by the landlord or developer. In other, less common instances, discrimination may be aimed at very particular communities. As per one study, 88 percent of the respondents among Delhi’s landlords declared that they did not want to rent their flats to unmarried couples and 56 percent stated the same about Muslims. Among the same sample, the respondents perceived people from the state of Haryana as one of the least preferred tenants (Haryana is a region next to Delhi and the stereotype about its inhabitants is that they are uncouth, rural brutes).

The concern about housing discrimination was one of the canvases on which Indian writer Prayaag Akbar based his first novel, Leila. Part of its dystopian vision involves future Indian cities largely divided into gated communities for particular castes. It need to be stressed, however, that all of the above (and many more) examples do not mean that this fictional vision has become a reality. While housing discrimination is a common occurrence, a typical Indian neighborhood is nevertheless diverse.

This type of social ostracism is also not a product of large cities and not a particularly new phenomenon. Indian villages were traditionally divided, with high castes often occupying different spaces from the low-to-middle castes, and both seeking to isolate themselves from the lowest social level of the outcastes, the Dalits (untouchables). Historically, space, resources, and amenities (like wells and schools) were divided in a way to isolate some classes from each other.

And yet, a part of those traditional divisions are broken now, and some of the once-prevalent orthodox rules are hardly present. The Dalits were once kept away from entering many temples and not even allowed to sit in the same schools with children of other castes, both of which limitations have been largely done away with. Thus, while there is no denying that housing discrimination is a disturbing phenomenon and perhaps one that cannot be stopped completely, historically India has pushed through even more challenging social reforms. The fact that the problem has been noticed both by the media and the government casts a ray of hope.