Raw nerve

Do I look like a criminal or a terrorist? asked Emraan Hashmi,claiming that he was denied a house in Mumbais Pali Hill locality because he is Muslim.The issue has,predictably,exploded into a face-off between those who believe that Hashmis is a high-profile case of a prejudice all too familiar,while others claim that he is a privileged celebrity milking the occasion for easy publicity.

The truth is that individual success does not always allow you to float free of the heavy weights of identity and expectation. Boldface names from the movie industry,from Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar to Saif Ali Khan and Aamir Khan,have shared stories of similar exclusion. Then there are some striking parallels between Hashmis housing woes and the ruckus,in America,over the arrest by the police in Massachusetts of an African-American Harvard professor. In both cases,there might be counter-claims that their relative privilege insulates them from such bigotry. But,regardless of the exact truth in either,the special charge of the complaints is because they point to painful truths larger than the facts of the immediate provocation.

Hashmi didnt end up getting the house,and now has to contend with a police complaint filed by a BJP activist,accusing him of promoting enmity between communities. What is remarkable is the extent of denial,the way many Indians refuse to acknowledge how much our society,and consequently our housing societies,are riven by identity politics and prejudice. Last year,Madhavi Kapoor,a schoolteacher in Pune,found herself in the headlines for the simple act of selling her house to a Bohra Muslim family in the teeth of bitter opposition from her housing society. As she then wrote in these pages,she refused to acquiesce whether they stem from mental models of purity and pollution or scarred memories of communal conflict. And the Emraan Hashmi case has once again outed this everyday injustice.  In Saul Bellows oft-quoted words,for gods sake,open the universe a little more!