THE IMPACT OF GHETTOIZATION IN OUR CITIES
First published by SPACES magazine, Nepal in their September-October 2021 issue.
The initial usage of the term ‘ghetto’ can be traced back to 1516, when the Jewish population of Venice was confined to an island called New Ghetto. Later, the word was revived by the Nazis to refer to the Jewish camps that saw widespread misery in the form of congested establishments where disease and starvation were commonplace. Later still, this word was first associated with, and then, reclaimed by the African-Americans or the Black community for their segregated settlements.¹ Today, the term ‘ghettoization’ is commonly used for areas that are characterised by a homogeneous crowd (mostly minorities), are congested and informally developed, lack several basic civic amenities, and are perceived to be associated with high crime rates.
While the Jewish ghettos were characterised by forcible occupancies carried out by the Nazi officials, the more modern ghettos found in democratic countries often come up as a result of non-overt factors like racism in the case of Black Americans and Islamophobia in the case of Muslims.
This sort of discrimination is manifested through the vilification of the minority group, which is done through disproportionate critique of minorities by the media, their stereotypical representation in movies and literature, and through the exaggerated proclamation of false narratives about disadvantaged people by politicians and authoritative figures.
While this sort of vilification generally starts off with an agenda to either legitimise the ill-deeds of people and organisations in power or de-legitimize the acts and existence of minority groups or to distract citizens from asking questions about pressing issues by creating a ‘villain’; soon, it does not require a mastermind to function. People start to accept these narratives as realities, and thus, issues like racism and Islamophobia see a rise through the acts of common people!
While there are several ways in which racism is projected onto the sufferers by dominating communities, a few methods that exacerbate the process of physical exclusion in cities are the refusal of loan sanctions as well as the reluctance shown in renting out or selling properties to disadvantaged minorities in non-ghettos. Ghettoization is also caused by the fear and insecurities that minorities experience, on account of the disproportionate force used by government officials against them, the high rate of persecution that people from such communities face, the hate crimes that they regularly encounter, and the constant judgement that they face for their appearance, food, or clothing outside their ghettoized settlements.
In the absence of a viable environment for minority groups in the larger city, they are forced to settle down in confined spaces and develop their own microcosms where they can live with dignity and freedom. These areas often come up illegally and informally, and are thus, cross hatched on master plans and referred to as unauthorized settlements. In the absence of basic civic amenities (unavailable since they are illegal) and crunched space in such localities, they suffer further dereliction and decline.
Such segregated enclaves are often disconnected from the main city, like the Juhapura locality in Ahmedabad, which is explicitly detached from the main city, so much so that the availability of public transport is also scarce in the area.
Often, such segregated areas are aestheticized in such a manner that people begin to view them as physical manifestations of their culture. This is specifically true for Shahajahanabad, an area that is always viewed as a potential tourist location, but is almost never seen as a viable option for people to settle down in. Such fetishization and commodification serves to make light of the fact that these are largely ghettoised areas and serves to aestheticize the choked roads of the old city as cultural entities!
The ghettoization of minorities also ensures reduced interaction between different communities, which further results in the unabated alienation of the minorities from other communities.
Such segregation of Muslims is increasingly being seen in India.
India has often been prided over as a syncretic country that has been accepting of several religions, cultures and practices over the centuries. However, during the British rule, there was an urgent need by the Britishers to create conflict that could divide the dissenting population. This was most prominently done by dividing people along communal lines. The lasting impact of this division is succinctly put forth by a rap called ‘The Breakup’ written by the British-Pakistani actor, Riz Ahmed, in these words:
“Asked her to leave, protest peacefully, I’ll be the best man
She got violent, ran off in the end ’cause she was stressed out
And then she went, took a knife out from the bed stand
Carved a scar down my middle just to leave me stretched out
I survived her attempt to dead man but the bleeding never ends, man
See, my cashmere jumper’s still stained red, man”
Here, ‘she’ refers to Britain, ‘carved a scar’ refers to the etching of the Radcliffe Line and ‘cashmere jumper’ refers to the still ongoing conflict for/in Kashmir.
This upheaval was further characterised by communal riots and the exodus of 1947! This intractable change was also visible in the change of demographics of both the countries, as well as in the creation of newer in-country and in-city demarcations that defined how people would now live.
In Delhi alone, Muslims went from occupying 33% to a bare 5.7% of the total population, post-partition.² This newly assigned minority title to the Muslims, along with the highly sensitive communal environment post-partition increased both the violence as well as the fear of violence against Muslims in India. To counter this, Muslims were shifted to newly established camps by the government, and later, into separate Muslim zones where they then began to live in.
This history of communal tension, instead of fading away with time, has only exacerbated due to the rampant Islamophobia that is internationally and nationally propagated. Thus, Muslims have continued to live in their isolated settlements to ensure a sense of security.
The beautification project of Shahajahanabad, during the 1980s further pushed away Muslims from this area, as they were forcefully evicted and rehabilitated in localities like Seelampur and Welcome.³ While the poorer residents shifted to these areas, the middle class and rich Muslims bought land in the Jamia Nagar area. This area was considered posh and elite, thanks to the presence of Jamia Millia Islamia, and the sparse population that dotted the area. The area is known to have been a prominent picnic spot, with views to the Yamuna River at that time.
However, as time passed by and the underlying tensions between Hindus and Muslims kept on manifesting in the form of riots, and later, isolated lynchings, the Muslim population kept on migrating from mixed zones to Muslim areas, like North-East Delhi and Okhla.
While the movement of Muslims into ghettos in Delhi has happened gradually over the course of several years, the migrations in other prominent cities like Ahmedabad and Mumbai largely happened around 2002⁴ and 1992 respectively. Both Juhapura and Mumbra are some of the most heavily populated ghettoised areas in the country. What makes it even more difficult for Muslims in Ahmedabad to expand their settlement is the almost roguish Disturbed Areas Act that is responsible for pushing the Muslims into the shanties of the city.⁵
While these Muslim ghettos are viewed as homogenised societies by most people, they are far from homogeneous.⁶ Within these localities, the only common denominator is religion. Other than that, people are highly heterogeneous on the basis of income, caste, class and even the region that they might have migrated from. When divided along these pluralistic attributes within the ghettoised society, it is of course, the poorer families that bear the brunt the hardest.
Although the Jamia Nagar area is almost completely identified as an illegal settlement, it is mostly the slums that get destroyed when redevelopment is demanded by government officials. This can largely be attributed to the large scale corruption that exists in South Asian countries: while the richer residents bribe their way out of such predicaments, the poorer ones have nothing to offer to save themselves and their shelters.
Although the ghettoization mainly happens to ensure a sense of safety and dignity, when confronted with discrimination, people develop a sense of solidarity and an inflated sense of pride that helps in increased efforts towards the preservation of their culture, religion and practises, and also ensures the reclamation of cultural and/or religious markers as symbols of self-assertion in spaces of protest. Example of this can be seen in the usage of the Palestinian keffiyeh as well as in the chants of La ilaha illa Allah by Muslims in India while protesting.
The recent success of the anti-CAA protests also confirms that the segregation of minorities in such a manner that they are condensed in one part of the city, ironically ensures the success of agitations that are carried out to demand rights for minority groups. Had the nearly 14% Muslims of India been equally placed in all localities of the country in the same demographic composition, these agitations would have been hard to organise, and their physical point of inception difficult to determine.
One can only hope that the calls for justice voiced regularly by people from minority groups can help in the improvement of the conditions of these ghettos. This can be done by actively addressing the root of the problem instead of demanding patchwork policies to only solve impending problems.
¹ https://time.com/5684505/ghetto-word-history/
² https://www.dawn.com/news/1079008
³ https://indianexpress.com/article/india/muslim-ghettos-of-delhi-6297633/
⁴ Laliwala S, Jaffrelot C, Thakkar P and Desai A, 2020, India Exclusion Report (2019–2020), from the essay: Paradoxes of Ghettoization: Juhapura ‘in’ Ahmedabad, pp. 111
⁵ https://news.trust.org/item/20170724130337-juvwh
⁶ Kirmani N, 2013, ‘Questioning the Muslim: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality’, 1st ed., London: Routledge India, pp. 51 (Nida Kirmani, in her book, has established through several observations, interviews and interactions, that despite the highly monolithic idea of identity that is ascribed to the population that lives in an area ghettoised along sectarian lines, the people within such a settlement are as diverse as they can get, both in their social and economic standing, as well as their ideologies and beliefs.)
