The Gujarat Chief Minister’s attempt to distinguish herself from her predecessor by making women’s issues a priority hardly gets around the deep discrimination that Muslims in the State face in the form of communalism and a lack of housing.

On April 11, Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel visited Juhapura, a neighbourhood in the new west zone of Ahmedabad. The convoy of sports utility vehicles that was followed by police and media vehicles marked the first time that a Chief Minister was visiting the Muslim ghetto, whose population doubled after the 2002 riots. Two weeks prior to this, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation had announced its plans to demolish more than a hundred illegal buildings in what is the largest Muslim ghetto in the city. Demolitions and the consequent resistance by residents began in late March. Shabnam Sheikh, a 17-year-old girl living in Juhapura, sent a petition in the form of a single question to the Chief Minister. Her parents’ house was on the list of buildings to be demolished while her uncle’s house had been razed.

Ms. Sheikh had heard rumours that Ms. Patel had planned to announce new projects to ensure the uplift of Muslim women and that she would reverse the Gujarat’s government earlier record of denying basic services like schools and roads to Juhapura.

The girl wrote out her question on a sheet of paper and walked through a crowd of photographers and politicians, both from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the Opposition Congress party, to reach Ms. Patel’s inner circle. Before she could speak to the Chief Minister, one of the staff members stopped Ms. Sheikh, grabbed the paper from her hand, and read it. It said: “If my father pays the ‘impact fee’, will you stop the demolition of our home?”

He tossed the sheet of paper aside and said, “No! No! The CM will not answer that. She is only here to talk about women’s issues.”

After Ms. Patel went around Juhapura for about an hour and a half, she announced the government’s plans to build a school and a woman’s health centre, all of which left Ms. Sheikh unimpressed. “None of these promises will make a difference if we do not have a home,” she said.

‘Impact fee’ and Juhapura



Weeks earlier, on a Saturday morning on March 28, Ms. Sheikh was watching television at home when bulldozers arrived. Being Ram Navami, the birthday of Ram, she was off from school. Her 14-year-old cousin, who lived a few buildings away, ran in frantically shouting about an “impact fee”, the first time Ms. Sheikh heard the phrase.

Juhapura is an area with nearly five lakh residents, almost all of them Muslim. On the outskirts of Ahmedabad, it came under the city’s municipal government in 2007. Most of the area is still designated as prime agriculture land despite the fact that there is no farming done today within the boundaries of Ahmedabad. Juhapura is also the largest land area within city limits earmarked for sewage storage and treatment.

Ms. Sheikh’s family moved to Ahmedabad from rural Gujarat five years ago. Unable to take a house on rent elsewhere in the city, they moved to Juhapura. Before the 2002 riots, Juhapura’s population was about half its size but has grown since. The Sheikhs knew that they could save money living in an illegal building, as the rent can be half of what it is for a legal building, an important consideration for a struggling carpenter like her father, Mansoor Sheikh. They hoped to gradually save and make their home legal. “The government is obliged to provide residents the option of paying the ‘impact fee’, a service which would start the legalisation process,” said Rizwan Kadri, an architect in Ahmedabad. This was not an option given to Juhapura residents like Ms. Sheikh’s relatives whose home was torn down.

As the bulldozers began demolishing eight buildings in Juhapura, Mr. Sheikh had some questions for the city officials: “Why are you only doing this to Muslim buildings? Why are you making us pay taxes if you are not providing us with services?”

He got no answers.

Policemen carrying batons and tear gas canisters also surrounded Fatehawadi and arrested dozens of residents who resisted the demolitions. While Mr. Sheikh was in a mosque, his wife and children watched from their apartment. “They are breaking our backs,” he said.

The controversial Fatehwadi site, across 84 acres, was acquired by the Ahmedabad Collector after the Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA) planned a sewage treatment plant at the site. But after the 2002 riots, a number of Muslim families began migrating to the open plot from different areas of the city.

In 2006, with the expansion of Municipal Corporation limits, the area came under its limits but the civic body saw that constructing a treatment plant would be impossible. On the day of Narendra Modi’s landslide victory as Prime Minister and leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party last May, I spoke with Bhushan Bhatt, a BJP legislator in Gujarat whose late father, Ashok Bhatt, was a confidant of Mr. Modi. “You will see, you will not even recognise the new India,” he said. Moments later, he chided me for asking a question about Gujarat’s Muslims. “Mohamed,” as Mr. Bhatt addressed me, “today we should speak only about one Bharat.”

Integration a challenge

A few feet away, I noticed a group of saffron-clad men dancing. On noticing my camera, one of them stopped to declare, “We will now teach Bangladesh and Pakistan a lesson.” Later that night, groups of BJP supporters drove through Juhapura, chanting, “Kashmir hamara hai! (Kashmir is ours!)” Fireworks were set off throughout Ahmedabad that night but Juhapura was on police lockdown.

In a recent study published by Charlotte Thomas of France’s Sciences Po University, she cites integration — both economic and social — as being one of the key challenges that Muslims in Gujarat face. Thomas spent six years visiting Juhapura and she has documented the struggles Muslims face in having loans sanctioned, getting school admissions, and even in filing complaints with the government. She concludes: “Although formally Muslim citizens have the same rights as their Hindu counterparts, in Ahmedabad and even more in Juhapura, their ethnicity disqualifies them from an effective form of citizenship.” (See: http://goo.gl/XZMR7u)

J.S. Bandukwala, a retired physics professor and one of Gujarat’s most seasoned human rights activists from Vadodara, is not optimistic about the changes he has seen since Mr. Modi’s victory. In September last year, clashes between Muslims and Hindus erupted for nearly a week near his home, leading to two deaths and the arrest of over 150. He spoke about the growing influence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) over Gujarati society.

Ali Asgar Zaveri, a Muslim businessman, bought a house in an upper-class Hindu neighbourhood in Bhavnagar; in December, after his neighbours objected to his presence, Pravin Togadia of the VHP led a campaign and forced him to sell the house and move back to a Muslim area.

There are also increased efforts to make Muslim majority schools begin their days with mandatory salutations to Hindu deities. For Mr. Bandukwala, it comes as little surprise, “It is what I have been saying all along but people do not want to listen,” he said. “This is not just about one man, Modi. This is institutionalised discrimination.”

In February, I drove around the Kalyan Nagar slum with the 68-year-old activist. Kalyan Nagar was being razed by the government to make way for a new development project. Hindu and Muslim homes were also being demolished. Mr. Bandukwala fought for the Hindu slum residents to find housing again but feared that it would be unlucky for the 450 Muslim families there.

He had reason to be pessimistic. During the 2002 Gujarat riots, Mr. Bandukwala’s home was burned down, and for years no Hindu family would want to live next to him. By late May, the 450 Muslim families still did not have a permanent, legal place to live. “Before it was just a small segment of Hindus that insisted that Muslims should not live next to them, but now it is the overwhelming majority,” he said.

Housing as defining issue



For Rafi Malek, the founder of the Ahmedabad-based urban planning focussed Center for Development, the defining issue for Muslims in Gujarat today is housing. “We cannot say that because Gujarat is riot free, therefore there are no problems,” he said. “There is another type of violence occurring and that is the denial and the lack of quality, legal housing for Muslims.”

Mr. Rizwan Kadri echoed his concern. “Muslims are about 10 per cent of Ahmedabad’s population and yet Muslims only occupy about 4 per cent of the land. There are no government provided low-cost housing schemes in Muslim-dominated areas and the Gujarat government is not making legal land available for Muslims to expand on, as they are for the Hindus. The law and city planning itself is biased against Muslims,” he said. He acknowledged that the previous Congress government had also made it difficult for Muslims to gain access to legal housing but warned that the issue was now reaching “a dangerous level”.

Damini Shah, a professor at the Gujarat Vidyapith University, researched three Muslim-dominated areas in the State — Anand, Ahmedabad, and Sabarkantha — for a Gujarati language report on housing, published earlier this year. She found that 85 per cent never tried to return to their original residence after shifting to the ghetto, 92 per cent of residents do not have contact with the majority (Hindu) community, and 93 per cent described themselves as being in financial distress and struggling to find work.

Part of the problem is that the current government, like Mr. Modi’s government before it, has stigmatised those who bring up the topic of Muslims in Gujarat. When a group of mostly Hindu students from Ahmedabad University tried to interview the Ahmedabad city government earlier this year for their class project on ‘the ghettoisation of Muslims,’ they were told to leave. One official even told them that their efforts to understand this problem would create more division. This is how the Gujarat government, both past and present, has dealt with many issues — by stigmatising the complainant.

Chief Minister Patel has tried to distinguish herself from Mr. Modi by making women’s issues a priority but Jameela Khan, a women’s rights activist in Juhapura who was also present during Ms. Patel’s visit to Juhapura, thinks this new focus is insincere. “The Chief Minister wants to hear us Muslim women speak on women’s issues but the moment we talk about communalism or housing, we are asked to keep quiet,” she said. “How can these issues be separated?”

(Zahir Janmohamed is an American writer living in Ahmedabad. He is working on a book about Juhapura.)