Life and angst in a ghetto

Juhapura in Ahmedabad, referred to as ‘mini Pakistan’ in a recent police FIR, is a picture of neglect, writes Sohini Das

Fifty-something Leelaben sells fish in one of the busiest bazaars of Juhapura, a Muslim neighbourhood in the western fringes of Ahmedabad, about seven kilometres from the city centre. Business is brisk. The nearby shopkeepers tell me that she, a non-Muslim, has been selling fish over here for almost 40 years now.

“I used to live in a house right here in Juhapura itself. My five children were all born here,” Leelaben answers queries as she cleans and cuts fish for her customers. “I moved out after the 2002 riots, not because I faced any issues at Juhapura, but because my relatives (read in-laws of children) had reservations about visiting our home here.”

The family sold its house and bought one in the nearby Hindu neighbourhood of Guptanagar, but kept up its business in Juhapura. Leelaben’s decision to not relocate her business out of Juhapura stems from sheer economic sense: she cannot sell fish in a Hindu neighbourhood in vegetarian-dominated Gujarat.

Several non-Muslim vendors go about their businesses unmolested in the narrow, dingy lanes of Juhapura, among Asia’s largest Muslim ghettos. But for outsiders, it is another world — a no-go area.

Such is the polarisation that a first information report on a brawl in the nearby police station of Rakhiyal calls Vatva (another Muslim neighbourhood) Pakistan! Juhapura is commonly called mini-Pakistan, which shares “Wagah-border” along the road that divides it from the Hindu-dominated Vejalpur. From the police to the common man on the street, this moniker is mundane and almost a normal part of small talk.

The insinuation is clear: the residents of Juhapura do not belong here. That makes many see superficial differences as unbridgeable civilisational gaps. “It is the stark cultural differences between the vegetarian Hindus and the non-vegetarian Muslims, the marked difference in their dress codes that leads to a certain feeling of mutual exclusion between the two communities,” says a senior government official who lives nearby.

A working paper from the Centre for Urban Equity of CEPT University of Ahmedabad, City Profile: Ahmedabad, mentions: “A clear divide exists today between these Muslim-dominated areas and the adjacent Hindu-dominated areas in Vejalpur, and the space between the two areas is commonly referred to as the “border” by both sides. The Hindu societies adjacent to Juhapura have built high compound walls, making the divide visible and stark.”

It wasn’t meant to be like this. Juhapura’s development as a residential area started after the 1973 floods in the Sabarmati rendered 2,250 slum dwellers homeless — these people were relocated to a small locality called Sankalit Nagar. This is Juhapura today. Crumbling infrastructure Before the 2002 communal riots, Juhapura was just another neighbourhood where Muslims lived in large numbers. It was a place for poor people. All told, it had about 50,000 residents. The riots caused Muslims from other parts of the city to converge here for safety — many of them were affluent people who could have easily afforded to live in a better neighbourhood. Today its population stands at over 500,000. Thus, ten times more people now live in the same space.

Naturally, the infrastructure has collapsed. A walk along Juhapura’s lanes (most of which are four-feet wide) shows that houses and shops have come up just about anywhere. You cannot access a house in the interiors in a two-wheeler, forget a car passing through these narrow passages. Most houses are about 10-feet wide, housing a shop on the ground floor, and share a common wall with adjacent houses. The roads are dusty without a hint of tar. Drainage is almost absent.

This has added to the resentment of the residents who were already sore at being herded into a ghetto. “We have been disconnected from the mainstream. We have played as much a role in the country’s freedom struggle,” says Imamkhan Pathan, president of Gujarat Lokhit Seva Trust. “Yes, one thing has definitely happened: there are police check posts all around Juhapura, encircling the area as if antisocials live here.”

I ask the police if the instances of crime are high in the area, which would necessitate such heavy deployment of cops. J D Jadeja, assistant commissioner of police, M division, says incidents of petty crime are high, “especially, crime against women and physical assault”.

He says there is only one dedicated chowki for Juhapura and that is inside the Vejalpur Police Station that borders the area. The rest are in the zones that border the

IMAMKHAN PATHAN President, Gujarat Lokhit Seva Trust

“We have been disconnected from the mainstream. We have played as much a role in the country’s freedom struggle”