By Aditi Raja
Sitting in his shop in the Chopdar Faliya neighbourhood of old Vadodara, Siraj Pathan, 52, a trader of embroidery materials, recalls how in the 1980s and till the late 1990s, boys in the neighbourhood would play cricket together, have friendly fights but never over their faith.
But things changed after the communal riots that followed the Godhra train burning of February 27, 2002, when “a lot of people from both communities stopped looking each other in the eye. Slowly, our neighbourhood turned into ghettoised lanes.”
What aided this exclusion, he says, was the 1991 Gujarat Prohibition of Transfer of Immovable Property and Provision for Protection of Tenants from Premises in Disturbed Areas Act.
The law, which empowers the administration to declare parts of the territorial jurisdiction as “disturbed” in the context of communal clashes, prohibits the direct sale of property between people of different faiths unless it’s cleared by the collector’s office, who has to certify that the transaction involves free consent. As part of the process, the administration interacts with neighbours to make sure that there is no coercion or threat involved in the sale.
While it’s a measure to rule out distress sales in communal situations, the law has, in a number of instances, come in the way of regular property sales between Hindus and Muslims. In many of these cases, neighbours have objected to the sale, citing a common misconception that the law prohibits the sale of properties from one community to another.
This story was originally published in indianexpress.com. Read the full story here.