Opinion How do you ‘disturb’ a city? In Rajasthan, just belonging to a particular community may be enough
The Rajasthan government seeks to pass a “disturbed areas” act. A genuine interest in the idea of peaceful co-existence in cities with mixed populations needs to ask why religious segregation happens in the first place
A genuine interest in the idea of peaceful co-existence in cities with mixed populations needs to ask why religious segregation happens in the first place (Express Photo: Bhupendra Rana) Starting from the late 1960s, Ahmedabad witnessed multiple periods of religious violence. As a result, the process of urbanisation in the city has been one of informal, but persistent, ghettoisation. Historically, religious geographies emerge from a natural process of the making of human settlements: Particular localities and cities become sites of sacredness – Varanasi and Ajmer, for example – and believers arrive and are admitted into the city. They are propelled through a search for calm and inner peace. In Ahmedabad, on the other hand, religious geographies have been created through expulsion and the need to escape violence. In Ahmedabad’s religious landscape, deprived Muslim-dominated localities such as Juhapura have resulted from an unnatural process of forced urbanisation.
In 1986, the Gujarat government introduced the Disturbed Areas Act to address the fracturing of the natural ethnic makeup of the urban environment. Among other aspects, but most importantly, the Act (slightly amended in 1991) sought to prevent the “distress sale” of property. The “violence-prone” areas of the city could be declared “disturbed”, and the District Collector was given authority to determine if the sale of property had been done under duress and the seller forced to move. That, despite the Act, Ahmedabad carries the legacies of geographical segregation along religious lines is, of course, another story.
The Rajasthan government seeks to pass a “disturbed areas” act of its own, and the Rajasthan Prohibition of Transfer of Immovable Property and Provisions for Protection of Tenants from Eviction from the Premises in Disturbed Areas Bill (2026) is soon to be tabled in the state Assembly. A key reason put forward is that the proposed act will curb “demographic imbalance”. This, media outlets report a key government minister as saying, results from one community seeking to become demographically dominant, and that leads to communal tension and “nuisance”. The minister went on to say that “population imbalance” is a key source of disturbance to public order.
There are three key aspects to the new language of populations, cities, and co-existence. All three carry significant meaning for the making of urban life, particularly in North India, where rural to urban migration is significantly determined by the desire for a better economic and social well-being.
First, it is important to remember that a “disturbance” is an event that fractures the normal rhythms of life. We think of a disturbance – a break in routine work activity, high blood pressure, or diversion of a flight due to fog – as a passing event. It is not thought of as something that will become an everyday part of our lives. The Rajasthan Act, on the other hand, seeks to define disturbance as part of a permanent state of affairs. By this definition, there is a perpetual threat to peaceful coexistence among communities that is caused by “demographic imbalance”. The so-called clustering of populations is now both cause and effect of urban tension. According to this logic, it causes disharmony as one particular community seeks dominance through, perhaps, forcibly purchasing property from another and forcing it to move elsewhere. And, its effects are disturbances to normal life. Since, implicitly, the community that is not dominant is imagined to be seeking dominance, the permanence of disturbance concerns the activities of that community.
Second, whereas in the Gujarat Act, disturbance was understood as something that happened through human activity – violence, displacements – there is something quite different about its meaning under the proposed Rajasthan Act. Here, disturbance is no longer linked to an action – or many actions – but concerns the evaluation of character. The fact that a particular community is located in a particular place is an adequate indication of the possibility of disturbance. The root cause of threats to peace and well-being is, well, just being. The law has shifted from interpreting acts to, in the first instance, judging personalities and character as the fundamental basis for violence.
The third aspect of the proposed Rajasthan Act tells us a great deal about the peculiarities of our age, where ideas of the free market live so comfortably alongside those that might be thought of as their opposite. Over the past few decades, there have been multiple efforts to create a market for land that, we are told, will lead to transparency in relationships between buyers and sellers and, in turn, economic growth that is fuelled by the ease of making such transactions. Various schemes of digitising land records and making it easier for farmers to sell land for urbanisation point to this. However, if the market for land and property is to be subjected to the logic of political strategy, what kind of economic development and public welfare can we expect?
A genuine interest in the idea of peaceful co-existence in cities with mixed populations needs to ask why religious segregation happens in the first place, rather than begin with the idea that it is a deliberate act that derives from the “peace-disturbing” nature of particular communities. Urban clusters of homogenous populations – often in the face of sub-standard living conditions that characterise such clusters – result from fear that results from underlying social conditions. They are the effects of disturbances and not their causes.
The writer is Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London
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