India Features
Muslims face a property crunch in Mumbai
Nov 6, 2007, 10:44 GMT
New Delhi - - In the fast-paced financial hub of Mumbai, Muslims are finding it difficult to buy, rent or even sell their houses and are increasingly forced to live in ghettos.
Ghetto has come to be a word exclusively reserved for Muslims, who started facing exclusion after a Muslim underworld kingpin set off multiple bombs in Mumbai in 1993, triggering large-scale riots between Hindus and Muslims.
'If you are looking for a house in Mumbai, never utter three words - Muslim, meat-eater, drinker,' says Jami Ahmed. The radio station marketer, who lives in Mumbai with a Hindu friend, says he has been unable to take a house on rent because of his religion.
'Many Muslims feel that this attitude stems from political hostility towards Pakistan. Whatever is Islamic, is from Pakistan, and whatever is from Pakistan is Islamic and thereby symbolic of Islamic fundamentalism, which is another form of terrorism,' says Fatima Batool, a journalist still looking for a buyer for her house in Mumbai.
Even well-to-do Muslims find it tough to make headway when it comes to property.
Sophiya Chaudhary, a Muslim video jockey with music channel MTV and married to a Hindu, has been looking to buy a house for close to two years. 'Everything goes well,' she told newspaper Mumbai Mirror, 'until the time I reveal my Muslim lineage.'
'While it was a norm earlier in lower middleclass localities, the bias against Muslims is becoming common in more affluent areas too. Most Muslims live in ghettos,' says Sandeep Sadh, CEO of the Mumbai Property Exchange.
Under laws governing the western Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, housing societies cannot discriminate unless the building is built by a charitable trust.
A Supreme Court judgement in 2005 that upheld the right of co- operative societies to restrict membership to their community has institutionalized insularity.
The trend to live as a clan already exists, as exclusive community enclaves for Parsis (Zoroastrian), Catholics, Hindu Brahmins, and other communities, dot the city.
In August this year television actor Amir Ali, alleging discrimination, moved a local court, saying he was denied a house because he is a Muslim.
PV Kamath, an eminent property lawyer, says there are at least 15 housing societies in Mumbai, in which 10.6 per cent of the population is Muslim, seeking to amend their bylaws after the court's judgement.
'If things continue this way we will make a Yugoslavia out of India,' author and rights activist Asghar Ali Engineer told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
'After the serial blasts in Mumbai by Muslim terrorists in 2006, Muslims have no option but to look at Muslim-dominated pockets,' real estate consultant, Yogesh Ganjawalla, says.
'We can't take a risk. If anything happens, both the landlord and police look for property agents,' real estate agent Narendra told newspaper The Telegraph.
Requirements of members of minority communities also have to be taken into account, says a developer on condition of anonymity.
'I am put off by the sight of goats and green flags (a reference to the Pakistani flag) during Eid,' Sunil Chabra, a Hindu businessman, told the Tehelka magazine.
'So I found a place in a Jain (conservative Hindu community) housing society, where no animal flesh or eggs are allowed to be cooked, eaten, and, as far as possible, touched.'
But living in the society left him embittered. 'It's hypocritical,' he says, 'because I have seen members of my society eating meat and swilling alcohol at restaurants outside.'
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-AgenturCOMMENT
blog comments powered by DisqusLatest Headlines in India
- 1. Police kill three during Hindu-Christian clashes in eastern India
- 2. Mosque siege ends in Kashmir with hostages freed, militants killed
- 3. Hindu party wins polls in India's riot-scarred Gujarat state
- 4. EADS denies reports that India scrapped Eurocopter tender
- 5. Microfinance firm to empower Kerala women
Older Talkback
page: 1
The civilised western world MUST boycott Hindu India's savage people. a.s.a.p
Read the article below:
-----------
SALEM, India (CNN) -- Fifteen hours after a baby girl was buried alive by her father in central India, police managed to pull her out -- and she was still alive.
Police say the baby survived because she had been buried among stones and there was enough space for her to breathe.
Every year, thousands of baby girls in India are murdered by their own parents.
Sociologists blame such killings on a widely held Indian belief that girls are an economic drain because families still have to pay expensive dowries at the time of their marriage.
Authorities have said that over the past few years, more than 4,500 female babies in India's southern Salem district alone have been killed -- by their own parents.
cnn.com ( h**p://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/south/07/07/india.infanticide.pt1/ind ex.html )
this article is a load of crap...move on nothing to see here!!
Goto www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=79&artid=23761
Tamil People Being Killed By the Sri Lankan State Army, Can the Western World Help ? US or UK Stepin ?
Googl/US/UK/MONEY/POWER/SEX
Type in muslim and dalit discrimination in google news you will get a princeton study confirming the above trends.
Seems like Nehru's secular democracy has not been relised.
.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=181424&version= 1&template_id=40&parent_id=22
Minorities face discrimination: studyPublished: Tuesday, 30 October, 2007, 08:07 AM Doha Time
NEW DELHI: India’s Muslims and low-caste Hindus have a harder time landing jobs and die younger than high-caste Hindus, even when they have similar educations and incomes, new studies have found.
A Dalit, a member of a low caste formerly known as “untouchable,” was about two-thirds as likely as a similarly qualified high-caste Hindu to get a positive response to a written job application, a Princeton University study found.
A Muslim was only a third as likely to hear back, showed the study, which sent out about 5,000 applications for almost 600 jobs from fake candidates with identical qualifications but identifiable group names.
“This study has been done for the first time in India,” researcher and Indian Institute of Dalit Studies fellow Firdaus F Rizvi said yesterday, adding it was based on similar work on racial discrimination in the US.
Rizvi carried out the 66-week study with economics professor Sukhadeo Thorat, who heads India’s public university regulatory body, and City University of New York sociology professor Paul Attewell.
“Minorities were very discriminated against,” said Rizvi, adding that the study found discrimination at the beginning of a job search.
Out of 179 responses to applications for jobs requiring a masters degree, 55 went to high-caste Hindus, 46 to Dalits and 32 to the Muslim candidates, while 46 also went to a wild-card candidate, a high-caste Hindu with a bachelor’s degree.
In a job search requiring a bachelor degree, 93 responses went to Hindus, 75 to Dalits, 53 to Muslims, while 73 went to the overqualified candidate — a Dalit with a masters.
In another of the four Princeton-funded studies on labour discrimination, two professors examined the employment expectations and job search experiences of high-caste Hindus and Dalits.
Postgraduate students in the Indian capital were more likely to be confident of employment in private corporations if they were upper caste Hindus, the researchers found.
“There’s been a lot of work on rural discrimination. The idea is that urban labour markets are anonymous and based on merit. We believe corporations look at things other than merit as well,” Delhi University economics professor Ashwini Deshpande said on Sunday.
“This is path-breaking research. It is using methods that were developed in the US and regarded as cutting edge in terms of studies of discrimination.”
Low caste Hindus reported being asked more intrusive personal questions about family backgrounds or about India’s public education and employment affirmative action programme, known as reservations.
Deshpande said she was not surprised that “the outcomes are highly influenced by what caste identity you have.”
“What was surprising to me were some of the interview questions,” said Deshpande, who has been working on the ongoing research project with Princeton University sociology professor Katherine Newman since 2005.
“It’s a way of saying, ‘We know exactly what you belong to. You guys are here only because of reservations.’”
The four studies were published in an Indian social sciences journal this month and discussed at a weekend conference in New Delhi along with other findings on social discrimination. – AFP
In the west mothers kill their own children. How many a stories surface every year!
In the east people sell their off spring!
In Africa kids are sold as well!
In China there is worst of child labour!
SO WHICH CIVILIZED WORLD ARE WE TAKING ABOUT?
Maybe the Indians are worried about 'Mumbaistan' forming!!
But the North Indian Krishna worshippers are typically very hostile against other religions and are pro female foeticide!
Currently I'm searching for a 1BHK in Mumbai as my wife and kid would like to move in next month... I would have thought that this article is made up by somebody, if I were living in Bangalore or some other city.. Unfortunately the article seems to be true! atleast from my experience..Its sad..but its a fact.
Hi,
I have faced similar problem in Pune city thought to be the Education center of the Western Maharashtra. The property dealers told me that Hindu landlords will not rent the home to you. Look for muslim landlords.
I have to find out Muslim Landlord at the end. This is very frustration.
KICK MUSLIMS OUT OF INDIA AND WE WILL ALL LIVE LIKE KINGS LIKE WE DID BEFORE THE DISEASE OF ISLAM CAME TO INDIA
I am an proud Indian and a Muslim - in that specific order. I love my country. I have traveled the world, and I find there is no other place like India. What I do wish for sometimes when I read such posts, is if only we had better Indians, more enlightened and mature Indians.
Indians, please take a look around you, and see the heights that have been scaled by those countries who have kept religion aside. It is obvious that some quarters of Indians still lack literacy, and therefore maturity of an enlightened mind.
And those who are literate (who write discriminatory posts) obviously lack the wisdom of understanding right from wrong, or may be continue to follow on the archaic and biased age old thoughts of their parents and grandparents.
Close your eyes, stand in front of the mirror, and visualise advancements that the world is making every second, while Indians find ways of dividing themselves. Now open your eyes, and see how stupid, and uneducated you look when you support discrimination against any gender, caste, religion, or anything else that makes one human different from another.
Wake up - like a True Indian, don't disappoint and let other True Indians down!
page: 1
AustinNov 7th, 2007 - 11:02:00
What a load of drivel...I live in Bombay and Im christian and I make up of less than 2 % our population but I think I enjoy all my liberties I can imagine so please stop posting such drivel . Id like u to check out more details about this muslim population u talking about.
Report this comment