Ayaan Sheikh (name changed to protect identity) had just moved to Patna, Bihar, in August 2023 after graduating from University of Oxford in the UK. An engineer and development professional, Ayaan began looking for a rental accommodation soon after he shifted base to a new city.
His enthusiasm wore off before things could really begin.
Whenever he revealed his identity as a Muslim, he was denied the house. Those who could not quite figure out his religion due to an agnostic-first name would ask intrusive questions about his family background, birthplace, and education until his religion was clear as day.
Then, he was denied the house. Eventually, he had to leverage his connections in the civil services and request an IPS officer vouch for him to rent a house. However, such privilege is far from reality for most Indian Muslims, facing frequent rejections in the urban housing rental market.
“This wasn’t the first time I had been denied housing because of my religious identity. I had previously faced this in Delhi-NCR, but in some ways, I was prepared for it. But my experience in Bihar caught me completely off guard."Ayaan Sheikh
"I distinctly remember being rejected by at least 14 owners or landlords, but one conversation remains etched in my memory. The owner was thoroughly impressed with my profile and even asked me to guide his son on pursuing higher education abroad. But that admiration quickly faded when he learned I was Muslim," he recounted.
Existing legal precedent by courts in India has recognised the right to shelter as a fundamental right under the Right to Life. However, housing justice remains an overlooked policy problem.
Within this, Indian Muslim is the farthest away from the said “justice” due to the impact of the post-colonial socio-political landscape that views Muslims as the “other” in a long-stretched xenophobic discourse of the far right.
Normalising Islamophobic Narratives
After facing several rejections, Ayaan decided to ask why. He wanted to find out what really made the non-Muslim landlords deny housing to him, a Muslim.
The owner, who had been seemingly impressed by him, told Ayaan, "My mother isn’t comfortable with Mohammedans—especially because they are unhygienic and eat meat."
Distraught, he would often reminisce about the time when peers from his engineering days would jokingly call him a "terrorist". The discrimination was not new, merely a manifestation of anti-Muslim sentiments piled up over decades.
The populist narratives against Muslims—the dirty, dangerous, and scheming neighbour—make it easier to alienate them from the so-called secular enclaves. These narratives feed into and, to some extent, justify sinister tactics, such as the infamous State-led bulldozer politics, leaving the allegedly criminal Muslim households disenfranchised.
Housing has not been the locus of any significant civil society activism in India. There have been localised movements led by activists, for example, Anand Lakhan in Indore, Lakhi Das in Jamshedpur, and Abdul Shakeel Basha in Delhi.
However, none of these has consolidated into a larger movement for housing justice. Independent India’s experiments with housing reform have been myopic at best.
Anand Lakhan highlights this problem of connecting encroachment with crime—an issue of the State’s failure to secure tenure and ownership rights for economically backward communities living in contested lands and, of late, a tool to suppress dissent. The criminality is a comfortable gateway into encroaching upon these properties in an effort to promote systemic erasure of Muslim spaces, voices, and histories.
The continuous, strategic effort at erasure of Muslims from the nation’s social and economic lives is pushing them into the peripheries, politically and personally.
Scholars argue that Muslims self-segregate in ghettos to find safety in numbers, as the State fails to provide them with a sense of security. However, communities also organise into enclaves, which is voluntary.
But whether voluntary, forced, or both, one cannot deny the influence of contemporary India’s socio-political reality in promoting such segregation.
An Implied Right: Legal Framework of Housing in India
Housing is not just houses. The question of housing goes beyond that of acquiring a material commodity, extending to approach it legally, socially, and politically. In many countries like South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil, housing is a justiciable right. In India, although not enshrined in the Constitution, various legal precedents have established housing as a right.
The Supreme Court of India in Shantistar Builders v Narayan Khimalal Totame (1990) observed,
“Basic needs of man have traditionally been accepted to be three—food, clothing, and shelter. The right to life is guaranteed in any civilized society. That would take within its sweep the right to food, the right to clothing, the right to a decent environment and a reasonable accommodation to live in.”
The court further established the right to shelter as a fundamental right, stemming from the right to residence under Article 19(1)(e) and the right to life guaranteed under Article 21 in various landmark judgments.
The Indian judiciary has adjudicated on facets of structural discrimination in housing. However, the responses in the two landmark cases were varied.
In 2005, the Supreme Court, in the case of Zoroastrian Cooperative Housing Society vs. District Registrar, upheld the bye-laws of a Parsi Housing Society prohibiting the sale of apartments to non-Parsis, highlighting the community’s right to associate with each other. It overlooked the "constitutional morality" check on the freedom of association under Article 19(4) and Article 15(2).
However, the State has also posed barriers to housing equity through executing legal statutes to perpetuate segregation. Legal instruments such as the Disturbed Areas Act (1991) in Gujarat to prevent distress sales have been evoked to “drive Muslim residents away from areas that have a mixed population.”
Although the Act was enforced to control distress sales after the 1985 Ahmedabad riots, with no large-scale communal riots taking place in Gujarat after 2002, the “BJP-led state government brought 74 new locations under the Act, increasing the number of 'disturbed areas' to over 700."
Under its 2020 Amendment, the law considers clustering of mixed populace as grounds for declaring an area as a disturbed area, while “maintenance of demographic equilibrium” is considered ideal. The amendment was stayed by the Gujarat High Court in 2021; however, the State planned to reconsider it.
The legal framework of housing justice in India, with all its promises and challenges, is unable to view housing justice holistically and fails to address the problem of Ayaan's inaccessibility to housing of his choice, despite his ability to afford it.
Social Biases vs Economic Interests
Riya Sharma (name changed), 29, a social worker was house-hunting in Taimoor Nagar, a posh locality in Muslim-dominated Okhla in Delhi.
During one of the negotiations for a house she liked, the broker said, “Itna kam kaise ho payega, madam? Iss ghar ke liye mere ek client Rs 30,000 rent dene ko tyyar hain, par woh Muslim hain toh owner unko ghar nahi degi. Keh rahi thi ki Rs 2,000-3,000 kam rent chalega par Musalman ko nahi dena” (How is it possible to agree to this rent, madam? One of my clients is ready to pay Rs 30,000 per month but the landlady will not rent the house to him because he is a Muslim. She said that she would rather reduce the rent by Rs 2,000-3,000 than rent it out to a Muslim).
Intrigued, Riya, a Hindu, asked why a landlord would deny the house to a Muslim in Okhla, of all places. One might, in fact, expect better communal relations in such areas.
However, her broker had no such views. “Woh [landlady] nahi chahti ki inka number badhe, waise hi itna hain aas paas, neeche ground floor pe bhi rehte hain” (The landlady does not want more Muslims around here... there are already so many. The family staying on the ground floor below is also Muslim).
Literature on housing sufficiently acknowledges the exclusionary practices marginalising prospective tenants across socio-political dimensions, especially religion and caste. A survey among property brokers in Delhi found that “live-in couples, Muslims, and people from Haryana are among the least preferred tenants”.
In another study conducted in the NCR, the authors found that 99.8 percent upper-caste Hindus received positive responses from landlords, compared to only 58.62 percent Dalits and 33.47 percent Muslims. A positive response meant the landlord was willing to rent their property without any differential terms and conditions.
Datta and Pathania (2016), through a rigorous audit of India’s real estate websites, found strong evidence of discrimination against Muslims compared to upper-caste Hindus seeking rental spaces in Delhi.
The Housing Discrimination Project, a three-year empirical research project on urban rental housing discrimination in India, found that Muslims chose to stay in Muslim-concentrated neighbourhoods due to rejection by non-Muslim landlords, gatekeeping by brokers, cultural and culinary preferences, and most importantly, safety concerns.
However, mere acknowledgement [of exclusion] does not address the complex interplay of drivers and processes, arguably State-sanctioned, that alienate minorities, especially Muslims, from spaces inhabited by the socially privileged.
The rise of right-wing politics in India over the last decade has further intensified discrimination along communal fault lines, entrenching spatial segregation. The discrimination is driven by an interplay of economic and social boycotts, manifesting into a spatial inequality targeting Indian Muslims.
Gatekeeping Muslims: A Collective Effort
However, it is not just the owners who refuse to rent apartments to Muslims. Brokers are persistent gatekeepers, too. They echo the sentiments of landowners, and often play a pivotal role in ensuring physical separation of communities.
One of the brokers confided in Riya, sharing that they cannot really blame the owners, they would never rent out their homes to Muslims either. ‘Madam, wo jahan jaate hain mahaul ganda ho jaata hai. Har taraf gandagi ho jaati hai, aap woh peeche waala mohalla hi dekhiye.’ (Madam, wherever they [Muslims] go, they ruin the surroundings. There is filth everywhere; take the neighbouring locality, for instance).
Driving out the Muslims is not just the prerogative of a non-Muslim landlord. Although there is limited literature on the role of brokers in enabling this bias, one must not absolve them of siding with the landlords just because it is their job.
They too, after all, harbour Islamophobia but have the privilege of pinning their inherent biases on the landlords’ preferences. In such a case, one might wonder—then where do the Muslims go?
A 26-year old entrepreneur, Iqra Khan (name changed) and her family moved to Sarita Vihar in early 2023. Sarita Vihar is a Hindu-dominated locality based in the municipal zone of Okhla in Delhi. Despite being surrounded by other Muslim-dominated localities, including Shaheen Bagh and Jasola, communal tensions run deep here. Iqra reported facing consistently unwelcoming gaze in the community at her Muslim appearance of a hijabi.
Her husband, a scientist, was allegedly denied entry into a grocery store because he was carrying raw chicken. Another friendly grocery store owner often advised them not to go to other shops as right-wing-leaning owners ran them.
It is to be noted that while theoretically (and, intuitively), financial well-being is often claimed to be the antidote for marginalisation, Indian Muslims have been systematically deprived of any such panacea. A scientist often finds themself as vulnerable to discrimination as a rickshaw puller when confronted by this dark reality.
Iqra’s family now lives in Singapore, where her husband works as a scientist, and she runs a business. Although the family might return to India, they vouch to never look for a house in any Hindu-dominated locality while being mindful of the fact that Muslim-dominated localities are not as liveable due to a lack of adequate public facilities, characterised by narrow lanes, open drains, and dilapidated buildings.
Concentration of marginalised social groups in poorer neighbourhoods is a major driver of intergenerational inequality across these groups. Members of these groups face unequal access to public services and possibly, worse access to employment, while socially disadvantaged due to populist stereotypes.
Research suggests that children who grow up in urban minority neighbourhoods attain less schooling, irrespective of parents' education, and household and neighbourhood consumption.
Spatial inequalities in access to public services and the role of an individual's location in seeking such access make denial of housing in a preferred location “[apart from being unjust] a cause of other persistent gaps, such as in educational attainment, health status, and employment status” [making housing discrimination a critical policy concern]. While Iqra might have been able to afford efficient public services, she compromised on that which a house represents—a safe and secure sanctuary providing an opportunity to live peacefully, with dignity.
House-hunting in India’s urban metropolitans is an arduous task for anyone, but is particularly challenging for Muslims. While the urban rental housing market is driven by supply and demand forces, like any other market, inherent biases regurgitate India’s continuing othering of Muslims.
As a direct consequence, Muslims are relegated to homogenous neighbourhoods where they feel more secure and experience a lasting camaraderie, although at the cost of public welfare services and civic conditions.
This begs the question—what does it mean to be a Muslim in India, and can they shatter the glass ceiling and have a seat at the table, transcending decades of discrimination? Maybe they can, if they find a roof over their head.
(Ragni Nathani is a development professional working at the intersection of gender and education since eight years. Her work focusses on reimagining education for adolescents through gender-transformative action. She leads Monitoring Evaluation and Learning in a grassroots NGO. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)