Muslim couple forced to sell house after protests by Hindu neighbours

A Muslim couple in India have been hounded out of their newly-purchased home by their Hindu neighbours who said they would not allow them to live there because of their religion.
Hindu residents of the posh TDI City – an upscale residential bloc in the northern city of Moradabad – began protesting on Tuesday night after news of the sale became public.
The incident resulted in a huge outrage in India after a video from the protest went viral. It showed one of the residents Megha Arora saying that Dr Ashok Bajaj, a resident, had sold his house to a Muslim family without consulting them.
“We cannot tolerate a Muslim family living right in front of our local temple. This is also a question of the safety of our women,” she said.
“We want the sale to be revoked and are asking the administration to cancel the registration of the house in the name of its new owners. We cannot allow people from another faith to come and live here. We will not allow them to enter and continue to protest as long as they don’t go away,” she added.
Many of the residents also visited the district magistrate’s office to lodge a complaint. Outside, they shouted slogans against Dr Bajaj and the Muslim couple.
The protests have had their intended effect. On Friday, Dr Bajaj told the BBC that a resolution, mediated by the city’s elected representative, had been reached and the new Muslim owners would re-sell the house to a Hindu family already living in the housing society.
Dr Bajaj, who runs an eye hospital in the city and had lived in the society for more than six years, said he had sold the house to the Muslim couple who are both doctors and that their families had known each other for 40 years. The Muslim couple, he said, were no longer comfortable moving into the house.
He added that the furore over the sale was “uncalled for” and that he had not expected it to become national news.
But there is evidence that incidents of violence and discrimination against India’s Muslim community have grown in the past decade under the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Anti-Muslim hate speech incidents have surged, with a majority reported from states ruled by the BJP – Moradabad is also located in the BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh. The BJP has consistently denied these claims.
Tanvir Aeijaz, professor of politics and public policy at Delhi University, says the incident in Moradabad “shows that religious polarisation has sunk in, that it’s working at the ground level”.
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Dr Bajaj says the protest started after he introduced the Muslim couple to his neighbours as a gesture of goodwill.
The backlash to the sale of the house, he said, “has come out of nowhere” as there are other Muslim families already living in the colony and that “we had always had a good rapport with our neighbours”.
“The controversy is changing the fabric of the city. Our intention was not to create any kind of unrest with this transaction,” he said, adding that “there is no law” against this transaction.
The colony also did not have a residents’ association that would need to approve the sale, he said. “Now they have woken up to make it.”