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?