Opinion A house for Mr Zaveri

While the state is famously friendly to investors, dedicated to removing obstructions in the way of a business project, it also appears remarkably weak-willed in ensuring the freedoms of some of its citizens. The right to private property, to buy, leverage and sell it, is a cardinal tenet of capitalist cultures, which Gujarat is pitched as an exemplar of. But Zaveri is being kept from occupying a bungalow he has legally bought for good money. He has been asked not to enter his own property “for the sake of peace”, and other residents have been holding “Ram darbars”, playing bhajans and reciting the Hanuman Chalisa.

In other words, the real estate market is severely and artificially restricted, and the state government has failed to intervene and set it right. In fact, the Disturbed Areas Act has an altogether different implication in Gujarat, where it serves to keep Hindus and Muslims in their own zones, the latter unable to buy and sell property in the open market. A law created in 1991, it was expanded after the 2002 riots — it covers 40 per cent of Ahmedabad, for instance — ostensibly to prevent distress sales and create extra-strong tenancy rights. But since tenancy rights are not transferable in formal real estate markets, minority groups have been pushed out through violence and intimidation.

More Muslims and Hindus have moved into separate spaces in Gujarat, finding trust and assurance only among neighbours of their own community, and it has ended up entrenching segregation and shutting Muslims out of the mainstream. As the Togadia incident underlines, this is not a matter of free choice alone. The fact remains that Muslims are refused housing and commercial space in many places and must be resigned to living and working in their own enclaves.

Though it is couched in terms of “food habits” and cultural friction, this spatial separation is now seen as natural, with property agents, both Hindu and Muslim, who sense a gap in the market even setting up upscale buildings in Muslim ghettos. This is not a sign of the Gujarati’s special talent for entrepreneurship. It is a sombre statement on how people are constrained to work through situations of blatant unfairness, expecting nothing from the state.