On June 10, more than 30 residents of a housing complex in Vadodara protested against the allocation of a flat to a 44-year-old Muslim government employee under the Mukhyamantri Awas Yojana. They claimed that the presence of a Muslim woman and her teenage son in the complex posed a “threat and nuisance”.
The incident underscored the deep-seated prejudice against Muslims in India. It also reflects a broader pattern of internal displacement faced by India’s Muslims, particularly over the last decade under Bharatiya Janata Party rule.
Similar instances of anti-Muslim bigotry have been seen across India. In June last year, Muslim traders in Purola in Uttarakhand, were threatened and their shops vandalised, forcing over a dozen families to flee. In March, a similar situation unfolded in Dharchula town, again in Uttarakhand.
After the violence in Haryana’s Nuh in August, the only community affected by the government’s “bulldozer justice” were local Muslims.
These attempts at displacement have been evident at least since the nationwide riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992. Many riots or disturbances have led to the forced relocation of Muslims from neighbourhoods with mixed demographics to ghettos.
This has been particularly visible in Mumbai and cities in Gujarat. After the riots of 1992-’93, Mumbai saw Muslims flocking to Mira Road and Mumbra. In Gujarat, after the riots of 2002, Ahmedabad saw the expansion of Citizen Nagar and Juhapura, home to around five lakh Muslims.
Many of these areas are often referred to as “Chhota Pakistan” by the Hindu residents.
This population movement may appear to be voluntary but it is, in reality, a coerced response to the state’s failure to protect its citizens, forcing them to seek safety on their own.
Human rights crisis
Even though these instances have been widely reported and criticised, the widespread displacement that Muslims face gets normalised as a byproduct of sectarian tensions rather than the human rights crisis that it actually is.
Perhaps, what is needed is a shift in perspective and to view the crisis through the lens of displacement and forced migration.
In his seminal 2023 essay, Conceptualising Displacement: The Importance of Coercion, academic Ali Ali makes an important distinction between displacement and forced migration. “Displacement is a process of coercive disruption to valued ways of living and functioning,” he writes. It “begins before people are forced to leave their places of residence and it can consist of an array of different pressures and constraints”. It is accompanied by “strategies of evasion and resistance, which are obscured by conflating displacement with the event of forced migration”.
Displacement, therefore, can occur without physical relocation, as seen in the aftermath of the 2020 Delhi riots where many Muslims stayed in their homes but continue to face severe discrimination and violence.
The experience of being displaced and forced to migrate is rather complex.
Victims of sectarian violence are often forced to abandon their homes, typically moving to the outskirts of cities that lack proper infrastructure. These locations are characterised by inadequate housing, poor sanitation and limited access to clean water. Education for children is disrupted and access to healthcare becomes scarce.
The economic impact is significant as well: many displaced individuals lose their jobs and struggle to find new ones, plunging them further into distress. The societal marginalisation they experience in their new environments often perpetuates cycles of poverty and exclusion.
Struggling for basics
Mumbra on the outskirts of Mumbai is an example that stands out. Originally home to a small community of Konkani Muslims, the population of the neighbourhood grew multifold after the Mumbai riots of 1992-’93 as Muslim families sought safety in numbers. Mumbra’s population shot up from 40,000 at that time to over nine lakh as of the last census.
It has taken decades for Mumbra to get basic infrastructure such as water supply, hospitals and schools – and it still struggles.
However, such neighbourhoods never fully develop or recover from the aftermath of violence. They get classified as ghettos and are often viewed as hotbeds of crime. For instance, during the peaceful protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act that discriminated against Muslims in 2019, a sea of policemen descended on Mumbra giving the neighbourhood the appearance of a site of potential danger.
Displacement involves a deep sense of betrayal by one’s own neighbours and fellow citizens, a loss of faith in people as well as the state machinery they previously considered their own, while being acutely aware of one’s own vulnerability to possible violence. For many sections of Indian Muslims, displacement is an everyday battle against emotional violence.
It is crucial to view the continuing experiences of vulnerable Indian Muslims, such as the woman government employee in Vadodara, through the lens of displacement and forced migration. This allows us to see the phenomena not just as religious discrimination but as a widespread crisis that requires judicial redress. Affected populations should not be left the mercy of an indifferent – and culpable – state.
Dipti Nagpaul is a journalist and postgraduate student of Migration and Global Development at the University of Sussex.
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