The only minority that matters

A fantastic article on how rulers manipulate the politics of identity, from Dawn's India correspondent, Jawed Naqvi.

. . . a highly popular, secular and now part-time social activist who would hardly pass muster as a Muslim was protesting how he had faced difficulty in renting a house in a ‘proper’ locality of Delhi. ‘They want me to live in a ghetto, and I refuse to do that,’ he told the audience tearfully, which incidentally included a handful of the ghettoised victims of Gujarat violence.

Of course there are people, mostly prejudiced Hindus, who want to ghettoise the Muslims in India, as there are Muslim zealots who have ghettoised the Christians and Hindus in Pakistan, not to speak of the Sinhalese doing it to the Tamils in Colombo. There can be no dispute about that. The question is: have the Indian Muslims ever asked why should anyone at all live in a ghetto, including the Dalits and others who do?