Nida Yamin the face of those who will not accept living in a ghetto as a fact of life in urban India

From: Indian Express

Pride of place

Seema Chishti : New Delhi, Mon Feb 18 2013, 02:47 hrs

You could call Nida Yamin the face of those who will not accept living in a ghetto as a fact of life in urban India.

When Nida, now 26, stepped out of her home in Delhi for a physiotherapy course — she would go on to become the first girl in the family to graduate — she thought the battle with reluctant relatives would remain the toughest she would ever fight. But her journey from Delhi to Ahmedabad — she now lives in Patna with her groom — pitted Nida against the deep biases still prevailing in urban India about who one's neighbour should be.

Against all family advice again, she had decided to take up work at IIM Ahmedabad last November as a research associate. She soon discovered that she could not choose her accommodation in a city that, while claiming to be urban India's promise, also has among the most tightly separated ghettos in independent India. "I was shocked at the kind of discrimination I saw there," she says.

Denied the flat she wanted in upscale Vastrapur along with her roommate Shwetambara — from Bihar, from where Nida's family too originally hails — Nida says what shocked her was that "I was told straight to my face by the landlady, after she had agreed to give us the flat, that she wouldn't as I was a Muslim. When I asked her how she could say that to my face, she told me casually that it was because of my father's face; he wore a cap and a beard."

Nida steeled herself. "As I was a development practitioner, I decided I would speak out," said Nida, who had enrolled at IIM to work on a rural sanitation project in Bihar.

She found support from Shwetambara, who too refused to stay in that flat and continued to hunt for another with Nida. A local daily published a report of her experience, after which she got "lots of calls with numbers of Muslim agents, for living in Muslim colonies".

Meanwhile, Zahir Janmohamed, 25, a US-based third-generation Gujarati expatriate who had witnessed the 2002 riots by chance, and who was now living in the Juhapura ghetto for a project on Muslims in such ghettos, contacted Nida and offered to help her find a roof over her head.

"I was struck by the brave and sensible girl," he says. "She told me she was a practising Muslim by faith and not accommodation, and would proudly tell people who she was and that she did not live in the ghetto but a city, as she did in South Delhi. She refused all offers."

Nida and Shwetambara did manage to find a place in Vastrapur eventually, but she was told she must not tell anyone she was Muslim. "I didn't want to give up my fight for maintaining my identity and self-respect, so I struggled for a month to find an apartment in the same locality, and found one," Nida says. "But my last encounter with discrimination did make me feel insecure this time, living in an unfamiliar locality. It made me cautious about speaking to neighbours this time. It made me maintain a distance from everyone in the locality."

As it turned out, Nida stayed there a month before marrying her fiance. "Fate has it that I will not go back to Ahmedabad," says Nida, who hasmoved to Patna with her husband.

Says Janmohamed, who was at her wedding, "I was struck by her matter-of-factness when she attacked deep-rooted discrimination which people accept and try and move on. She even refused to go by her nickname which is not indicative of her beliefs. When I congratulated her father at the wedding for her bravery, he did not even know about it."

While battling it out in Ahmedabad, Nida had keep it from her family for fear that the fuss would discourage Muslim families from sending girls out to work away from home. She says her family, especially her pious and supportive mother, had "stood by me when I decided not to take up an MBBS but instead to be a development practitioner, a field I chose because of its uniqueness; it went beyond the boundaries of one's profession. It gave me the freedom to become a bridge for the inequalities existing in society."

Though her roommate had bolstered her spirits by standing by her, Nida was disappointed with fellow IIM students who, she says, had felt it was odd of her not to be realistic and accept the discrimination as it was "the real world". "The shock of my life came after I discussed this issue on a broader platform during a class," she says. "There were about 60 final-year postgraduate students. When I raised this question of discrimination, 40 out of 60 kept quiet and 10 tried to explain to me that it happens and it's a normal situation in society. A major disappointment was the views of girls in the class."

Though she has left Ahmedabad, she says, "my fight against discrimination has just begun... I have travelled a lot around the country, and I have never hidden who I was and openly declared that I am a believer. We have always respected others who believe and have celebrated all festivals. I expect others to do the same."