Delhi communal violence will only push more people into ghettos, says political scientist Laurent Gayer

Northeast Delhi is where working-class Muslims and Hindus live in mixed neighbourhoods. But fear and anger are driving a wedge between the communities. Laurent Gayer, a political scientist who has worked on urban spaces and social integration in both India and Pakistan, and co-author of the book Muslims in Indian Cities, speaks to Amulya Gopalakrishnan about violence and coexistence.
Delhi is one of the most religiously segregated cities in your rankings. What has led to this situation? Are these ghettoes or enclaves?
Urban sociology classically established a distinction between enclaves, whose residents are supposed to congregate by choice with their kith and kin, and ghettos, where stigmatised populations are thought to be confined against their will. The growing sense of insecurity among Indian Muslims has collapsed these two categories into a single experience of marginalisation. In Delhi, as in other highly segregated Indian cities, middle-class Muslims currently live side by side with working-class Muslims in dilapidated localities. They have traded the comforts of middle-class urban living for security. Obviously, the recent pogrom will lead to new displacements and new attempts to search for safety in numbers.
What is the relationship between spatial segregation and communal violence?
There is no mechanical relationship between segregation and communal violence. Among Indian Muslims, feelings of insecurity are key to processes of enclosing and are deeply subjective. Delhi is a case in point: while, historically, this has not been a communally sensitive city, with ‘only’ 50 deaths in incidents of Hindu-Muslim violence between 1950 and 1995, its population has been increasingly segregated on religious lines since the 1990s. The city’s Muslim population has been responding to incidents of communal violence elsewhere in India and anticipated that such incidents could someday spread to the capital. Sadly, the events of the past few days have vindicated these predictions, and will certainly reinforce existing patterns of segregation.
The context for this violence was Muslims defending their right to protest, to claim public space. These very sit-ins and the traffic delays were held as provocation. Is this a new threshold in their marginalisation?
The anti-CAA protests are part of a global wave of urban uprisings, for which the city is not merely a background setting but a major stakeholder in the conflict between insurgents and incumbents. These are all struggles for the city, for its territories and flows, for the control of place and pace. The global enthusiasm of protesters for occupations and blockades is not merely a matter of protest tactics, though. It also carries a desire for new forms of collective life, brandished against the forces of parochialism, the disruptive power of capital and the violence of state repression. Anti-CAA activists in Shaheen Bagh and Jaffrabad did not only craft a new style of protests: night after night, they reclaimed the city as a place for pluralistic living and political solidarities across denominational divides. This sort of constituent imagination is a matter of concern for the authoritarian neo-liberal states that are becoming the norm worldwide. In India, this concern overlaps with what many Muslims and secular non-Muslims see as a systematic process of disenfranchisement of the Muslim population. In this perspective, reclaiming the streets is not only about restoring law and order or resetting the pace of circulatory flows essential to the economy: it is part of a political program aiming to replace the old citizenship by right with a citizenship by permit, which will be granted at the discretion of the rulers. The idea of the street as an arena for universalistic public claims, firmly rooted into the language of rights, is anathema to this new conception of citizenship. The ‘new India’ should brace itself for some street-fighting years.
Is there a gap between Islamophobic propaganda and lived experience in mingled neighbourhoods?
The events of the past few days have shown that many Indians were not ready to fall for the sirens of communalism. In Seelampur, for instance, Muslims and Dalits stood together against the storm threatening to be unleashed in their localities. There is no such thing as traditions of peaceful coexistence: coexistence is always hard labour. Sometimes, this everyday labour of coexistence pays. Communal forces are well aware of this, which is why they need to spread rumours and bring assailants from outside to disrupt long established patterns of conviviality. Without downplaying the recent destructions and dislocations, we should give their due to those Hindus who put their life at stake to save their Muslim neighbours and friends, or those Muslims who defended Hindu temples in the midst of chaos. This reminded me of a verse common to the Quran and the Talmud: “whoever saves one life, it is as if he had saved mankind entirely”.