Living with neighbours

SANJAYA BARU

Most people like to live in a neighbourhood of the similar and the familiar. In India we took it a step too far. In an Agraharam only Brahmins, often of the same sub-caste, would live. Dalits in a village were told where their place was. Moving into urban spaces, people continued to live among people they were familiar with. In my home city of Hyderabad the Maharashtrians from regions that were part of the erstwhile Nizam’s kingdom tended to live in and around Kacheguda. Tamilians, who came with the British-Indian army, lived in Marredpally. When Muslims moved out of the Old City they tended to live among their own in and around Masab Tank.

As the nation’s capital expanded, people arriving from different parts of the country found comfort in living among their own. Punjabi Bagh, naturally, had more Punjabis. Ramakrishnapuram had more South Indians. Bengalis felt more comfortable living among their own in Chittaranjan Park and in Bombay (Mumbai), the Tamils congregated around Chembur. As urbanization spreads new neighbourhoods come up but the effort is always to find neighbourhoods where one can live with the similar and the familiar.

Things have, however, begun to get difficult with communal and caste feelings gaining ascendance. Vegetarians have started banning non-vegetarians from coming in as neighbours in apartment buildings. Hindus do not want Muslim neighbours or tenants. Orthodox families don’t want single men or women and, in some places, live-in partners are a no-no as neighbours. And so, life becomes more complicated.

What happens in our limited neighbourhoods has also happened in our wider sub-continental neighbourhood. Our neighbours have become wary of us just as we have become less tolerant of them. One consequence of this has been that in both trade and tourism our neighbourhood does not count for much. South Asians indulge in less trade and travel with countries within the region than with countries outside. In the past Europe used to be ahead of India as a trade partner for most South Asian countries and with time China has acquired that status. There was a time when India was the biggest trade partner at least for Nepal. No longer. Perhaps Bhutan alone has that status.

While the level of economic and social interaction between neighbours within South Asia remains unimpressive, with time even the political relationship has weakened. Bhutan remains the only neighbour about whom we have no major complaints. Though the Bhutanese may be finding that the newly arriving nouveau riche tourists from India, with money to throw around, loud and noisy, are not exactly the kind of tourists they would like to welcome.

Look around and see that bilateral relations between India and most neighours remains touchy and prickly. Like the many inhabitants of apartment blocks in cities across the country, the present Indian government may also prefer having to deal with fewer Muslims in the neighbourhood! As the saying goes, one can change one’s friends, but one’s got to deal with one’s neighbours. Geography is a given.

A few years ago a senior minister from Singapore gave a lecture in New Delhi under the auspices of the India Foundation, a think tank associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party and headed by the BJP’s general secretary, Ram Madhav. The topic he chose to speak on was how Singapore has tried to deal with the challenge of ethnic and religious pluralism. Its founder leader, Lee Kuan Yew, implemented a policy by which in every apartment block there had to be a mix of Malay, Chinese and Indian origin Singaporeans belonging to different religious faiths — Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

By forcing people with different ethnic and religious backgrounds, and the consequent differences in cuisine and other social attributes, to live together, Singapore enforced good neighbourliness. It made people learn to live with one another. The Singapore minister’s Delhi audience listened to him politely, but the message has not got across.

Perhaps India requires such a policy that makes every citizen learn to live with others irrespective of caste, religion or region. It is not easy. But there has to be some effort at ending the creeping ghettoization that is happening. People like to live with the like-minded. They prefer to interact with the like-minded. Tolerance levels seem to be going down and good-neighbourliness is disappearing both within the country and within the region.

At the height of the era of optimism in India-Pakistan relations, in the period 2005-07 when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Pervez Musharraf were trying to evolve a workable formula for peace in the sub-continent and a final resolution of the Kashmir issue, Dr Singh spoke of a future in which one could think of “having breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul”. How far we have travelled since then.

Today one would be laughed out of court for having such a vision for the region. Dr Singh had also famously said that borders are but lines on a map. Today, borders are being defined by barbed wires and concrete walls. People visiting relatives across political borders have been asked to go back.

Diplomats talk of a ‘neighbourhood policy’. If we are not clear who our neighbour is, what policy can we have towards one? Many Indians seem happier embracing distant neighbours with whom one does not have much in common and find dealing with immediate neighbours more difficult. In fact, despite all the official rhetoric about a neighbourhood policy India has none. It has no way of dealing with both threats and opportunities in its immediate South Asian neighbourhood, even as it reaches out to distant neighbours in Southeast Asia and West Asia. 

Sanjaya Baru is a writer and Distinguished Fellow at the United Service Institution of India