Harsh Mander: Why Indian Muslims live apart

An inescapable feature of India’s urban geography is the Muslim ghetto: densely crowded habitations strewn with garbage, with potholed narrow lanes and open drains and conspicuously underserved with public services like schools and hospitals, sewerage, water and electricity supply.

Segregation has long been a normalised feature of urban living, as every Indian town and city is fragmented by class, caste and religion. But within these, although Muslims are more urbanised than other religious groups, and among the most segregated, they generally live in poorer settlements in urban areas, contributing a large proportion of the unorganised, daily wage workforce that perform “the dirtiest and worst paying jobs in the city”.

Why do Muslims, not just the working poor but also rich and middle-class Muslims, tend to live in segregated ghettoes? Some assume that this is a matter of choice, that most Muslims simply choose to live exclusively with people who share their religion and cultural practices. But a number of studies confirm that this is not the case. Muslims are actively excluded, even expelled, from mixed neighbourhoods. The driver may be the memories of the experience of communal violence, or fear. Or it may be by the routine reluctance of non-Muslims to sell or rent homes to…

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