Why segregated housing is thriving in India

Rizwan Kadri runs an architecture firm with three partners, all Hindus, in India's western city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat state. Son of a revenue official, he grew up in mixed neighbourhoods. In 2002, massive anti-Muslim riots sparked by the burning of a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, left more than 1,000 people dead in Gujarat. A few months before the riots, Mr Kadri moved out with his wife and son from a mixed neighbourhood where he had lived for 24 years to a Muslim apartment building in Juhapura, one of India's largest Muslim ghettos, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. A year later, his ageing parents joined them. "The move was prompted by concerns over safety more than anything else," says Mr Kadri. Ahmedabad, the main city of Gujarat, which was ruled by the new PM Narendra Modi for more than a decade, is among the many Indian cities where segregated housing is alive and well. A range of old reasons like caste and cultural differences - and some relatively new ones such as migration and religious tensions - have led to a proliferation of what urban sociologist Loic Wacquant, referring to ghettos in French and American cities, has described as "neighbourhoods of exile". Juhapura, an obscure village-turned-ghetto of some 400,000 Muslims, is one such neighbourhood of exile..." (Continue reading.)