Title: Vignettes of a 'Tolerant
Society'
The following from Tehelka:
I know of the discrimination against non-vegetarians in Gujarat
fist hand--from 1967. Seems like nothing has changed.
cm
No entry, we are the meat nazis
Gujaratis in Kalbadevi, South Indians in Matunga, Muslims in Mumbra,
housing societies shunning non-vegetarians. Mumbai always had its
ghettoes. But keeping 'outsiders' out was a covert exercise; the
law did not permit it. A recent Supreme Court judgement upholding the
right of cooperative societies to restrict membership to their
community could institutionalise insularity, writes Anuj Chopra
Ten years ago, Sunil Chhabra found a place in a Jain housing society.
His motto: no Muslims, no meat. He is a bitter man today. His
neighbours don't treat him well and constantly check on his eating
habits. On the other hand, Parsis believe their numbers will dwindle
unless they have exclusive baugs
In 1857, when Mumbai was Bombay, the British formed the Bombay
Gymkhana, a cricket club exclusively for Europeans. What followed was
the formation of exclusive Hindu, Muslim and Parsi gymkhanas. They
competed fiercely, not always in the spirit of sportsmanship.
Many-a-time, rivalry led them to spew communal venom. Even as the
clubs went, post-independence, the divisiveness remained.
Surreptitiously, it foraged from sport to homes - into Mumbai's
high-rises and sprawling housing colonies.
Today, exclusive community enclaves dot the city - for the
Parsis, Jains, Catholics, Sindhis, Saraswat Brahmins. The Gujaratis
are confined to Kalbadevi, South Indians to Matunga and Muslims to
Mumbra. Adding to these ethnic ranks is a strange criterion:
vegetarianism. Vegetarian ghettos in Mumbai are strictly out of bounds
for meat eaters.
This is Mumbai's claustrophobic reality. Just being Indian has
never been a blanket identity to live in these ghettos; "outsiders"
aren't welcome. You are an "outsider" if you eat non-vegetarian
food, if you belong to another caste, if you belong to another
god.
Bitterness festers beneath the calm in Talmakiwadi Co-operative
Housing Society in Tardeo, Mumbai. It's neighbour against neighbour,
community against community. Nirav Shah is a member of one of six
Gujarati families living among over 260 Kanara Saraswat Brahmin
families. "If I move to a Gujarati society, I'll make sure
non-Gujaratis are not allowed to live there," he says testily. After
an uneasy pause and with a lump in his throat he adds, "In fact,
I'll make sure they're evicted."
On August 7, the Talmakiwadi Housing Society, in its annual
general meeting, passed a resolution to amend its byelaws and cancel
its "open membership" policy, with an overwhelming majority; only
six out of 90 members opposed it. This resolution will be sent to the
Registrar of Societies for approval. If cleared, no non-Saraswat
Brahmin can seek residence here again. The non-Saraswats, like Shah
may continue to stay, but will not be allowed to buy more property in
the society, and may not sell their present property to any
non-Saraswat.
A Supreme Court (SC) verdict in April has given them teeth to
make this housing society a ghetto for Saraswat Brahmins. In a case
pleaded by Soli Sorabjee, former attorney general, on behalf of the
Zoroastrian Co-operative Housing Society, the sc Bench challenged an
earlier Gujarat High Court verdict that the society's byelaws
restricting membership to non-Parsis was illegal. It ruled:
"It is open to the members of the Parsi community, who came
together to form the co-operative society, to prescribe that members
of the community for whose benefit the society was formed, alone could
aspire to be the member of the society."
This verdict has brought these ineluctable prejudices out in the
open. Using it as a precedent, the argument subtly rumbling in housing
societies is: 'If the Parsis can do it, why can't we?'
In the past, attempts to form community ghettoes have been
quashed by the Bombay High Court. In a ruling in 1999 it rejected the
validity of the byelaw restricting membership in the same Talmakiwadi
Housing Society to non-Saraswat Brahmins in lieu of section 22 (1) (a)
of the Maharashtra Co-operative Societies Act, which makes it illegal
to refuse membership of a co-operative society to any person who is
eligible to contract under the Indian Contract Act, 1972. Further, by
Section 23 of the same Act, which deals with "open membership,"
it's illegal to refuse the membership of any person on such
frivolous grounds.
However, the SC verdict is changing all that.
PV Kamath, an eminent property lawyer, says there are at least
15 housing societies in Mumbai seeking to amend their byelaws. "This
will spread like wildfire when housing societies see other societies
going exclusive," he adds. Anand Ashram Housing Society in Gamdevi
and Salsette Catholic in Bandra are some of his clients in this
regard, he reveals.
Author and rights activist, Asghar Ali Engineer says people
could misuse this verdict as a legitimate precedent to openly refuse
membership to people from the minorities: "this depleting secular
ethos will make a Russia out of India."
Prof Akeel Bilgrami, chairman of the department of Philosophy at
Columbia University in the US distastefully remembers how he was
probed about his religion while seeking paying guest accommodation in
suburban Mumbai in the 1970s. "The 'mixed buildings' culture was
still alive then. But this inquisition put me off and I didn't
follow up for accommodation."
Ten years ago, when Sunil Chhabra, a businessman who spoke only on the
condition of anonymity, was house-hunting in Mumbai, he was clear
about his priorities. No Muslims. No Meat. He unabashedly admits he is
"put off" by the sight of "goats and green flags" during Eid.
So he found a place in the "sanitised" confines of a Jain housing
society in the suburb of Andheri, where no animal flesh or eggs are
allowed to be cooked, eaten and, as far as possible, touched. "I
vomit when I smell meat," he explains.
But Chhabra admits living here has left him an embittered man.
His neighbours, he says, don't treat him well. Their constant
peering into his house to keep a check on his eating habits roils him.
"It's hypocritical," he says, "because I have seen members of
my society eating meat and swilling alcohol at restaurants
outside."
Teesta setalvad, the editor of Communalism Combat, blames the city's
bourgeois. "It's the consumerist middle-class that masks this
perversion in an outward show of religiosity," she says. "The poor
cannot afford to harbour such biases," says Celine D'cruz from
sparc, an ngo spear-heading a movement to build community toilets for
slum dwellers. Milan Nagar Housing Society in the suburb of Mankhurd
is currently being built to relocate pavement dwellers, D'cruz
reveals. Four or five families will share a common toilet in the
society to promote mingling between different cultural
temperaments.
Is this divisiveness just about class? Or secularism (or a lack
of it)? It's a heady concept we've seen and heard too much of
since the last general election. "It's more organic," believes
filmmaker Paromita Vohra. "Living in a democracy isn't easy. And
it's far more complex if the society you live in is not
monotheistic, but multi-ethnic." Paromita's film, Defeat of a
Minor Goddess, investigates the layered divisions that pervade
contemporary Mumbai under the garb of cosmopolitanism. An escalating
war between two goddesses, Annapurna, the goddess of food, and Laxmi,
the goddess of wealth, which divides the city, brings out atavistic
biases over food, property and living. Vegetarians build fences with
non-vegetarians; Saraswat Brahmins exchange barbs with Jains.
"To prevent these prejudices spilling over from private
confines into society, we have to decide where private space ends and
where public space begins," Vohra emphasises.
But there's the other side as well. "Parsis will disappear
if there are no baugs exclusively for them," says Rustom Chottia,
the president of the Dadar-Matunga Parsi Zoroastrian Association and a
resident of Dadar's Parsi Colony. "As inter-caste marriages cause
the number of Parsis to dwindle each day. Living together without
outsiderscan prevent that from happening."
"Saraswat Brahmins are a small community," reasons Vithal
Nadkarni from the Talmakiwadi society. "Mixing up adulterates the
identity of our community."
Additional Registrar of Co-operative societies in Pune Subhash
Kashikar points out he hasn't ever been approached with complaints
of discrimination, verdict or no verdict. "Hardly anyone can
substantiate such complaints if there is no written evidence of
violation," he says.
Ten years ago when lawyer Flavia Agnes's law firm, Majlis, was
refused a place in Juhu because the firm's name was "too
Muslim", no action could be taken. "We asked for a written
explanation from the builder. He declined and no legal action seemed
possible," she says.
More recently, prominent hotelier Sanjay Narang's restaurant,
Roti, at Malabar Hill, which served non-vegetarian food, had to be
shut down after people began spitting on guests and pelting nuts and
nails from balconies of the vegetarian building where the restaurant
was housed. No substantial action against the "meat nazis" seemed
legally plausible.
The Registrar's office is gearing up to mend loopholes in the
law. An official from the department showed, off the record, documents
of a proposal sent to the state government for a clause to be added to
Section 22 of the Maharashtra Co-operative Societies Act: "Not
withstanding anything contained in the foregoing sub sections, no
person would be refused membership on the basis of cast, creed,
religion and gender." By adding this, according to the official, the
grey areas of the vague "open membership" in Section 23 will be
covered.
Even if the Talmakiwadi Society's resolution is eventually
rejected by the Registrar's office, the bitterness spawned will be
hard to eliminate. India has struggled to keep its cultural and
religious pluralism alive, but has seen communal divides and riots of
the worst order. Can such a country afford the institutionalisation of
insularity?
Sep 17 , 2005
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