The Residents’ Welfare Associations (RWA) are voluntary management bodies and not officially part of the government. They were formed under the Societies Registration Act, of 1860, with the members elected by residents of housing societies, apartment complexes and more.
Though RWAs are meant more as a way to streamline administration in housing societies, security and more such issues, however, reports have often come up of them using their power to send out notices and such in light of personal bias or prejudice against people they feel going against their authority.
It is quite commonly known that groups like bachelors, people with pets, LGBTQ+, Muslims, Christians and more always have a difficult time finding a house specifically because there is prejudice against them in society.
While RWAs don’t have any statutory powers, since they are recognised as a legal body and governed by a Memorandum of Association they can sue or be sued.
Reports are once again surfacing of the discrimination Muslims are facing in residential societies from RWAs.
What Do Reports Say?
A report by The Print, went into detail taking a look at how the RWAs have been behaving recently in light of which Muslim residents are either self-censoring or trying to keep as low a profile as possible to not bring any more trouble to them.
As per the report, during the RWA elections for Jasola’s Pocket 12 in New Delhi, Shabnam Khan contested with a team of 5 Muslim women but lost to a campaign by a Hindu majority group, however, the thing that struck her was a rumour being spread before the elections that if Khan won the society presidency then she would be destroying a Hindu temple in the area and replace it with a mosque.
Khan commented on this saying “Can you believe the kind of hate that has entered the hearts of people? They fight RWA elections with the same polarising narrative as state or general elections!” and how “During the campaigning, the other party was making this out to be an India-Pakistan match, [implying] that voting for my team would be akin to supporting Pakistan!”
While her opponent, advocate Ravindra K Sharma, denied these allegations, the report touched upon the moral policing being done by RWA members and how there is growing animosity toward Muslim residents and a wariness of including them in communities and society WhatsApp groups.
Tikender Pawar, former Shimla deputy mayor stated “RWAs have become highly exclusive bodies and urban authoritarian regimes. They don’t give space to Muslims or Dalits and are contributing to making cities ghettoised and financially centralised.”
President of the Federation of Apartment Owners Association in Ghaziabad, Deepak Kumar, also said to ThePrint that “Only one percent of the owners are Muslim. Most RWAs are unwilling to rent or sell flats to Muslims” and that “Some residents approach me in private and express concern about the rising number of Muslim families in our society since we don’t discriminate. It’s unfortunate.”
Read More: New Research Shows How Indian Muslim Women Face Discrimination During Hiring Process
RWA president Rajendra Sharma denied any such messages saying “I joined the campaign just one week before the elections; I don’t know of any such messages or rumours.”
It seems though that the RWAs are not entirely concerned with the rise in such cases, with Devraj Sharma, president of Seelampur RWA, also boasting and saying “In this gully, many Muslims are buying flats; they don’t participate in the society or anything. But they have been behaving well since 22 January—we ensured to put up many Ram Mandir flags, so Muslims can remain calm. They have behaved themselves since we put up the flags.”
A Muslim resident from Noida also commented “Holi, Christmas, Diwali, even Lohri, all are celebrated in my society, but not Eid. It may be a small thing, but it makes me feel weird. There are no Iftar party invitations on Eid, nothing; it’s not a day of note.”
Decode is a vertical of BOOM, a fact-checking website that also reportedly spoke with Muslim residents who have experienced getting hateful and discriminatory messages like WhatsApp groups of housing societies.
According to their survey, 40-year-old documentary filmmaker Abid (name changed), also commented on how during messages being shared on the group for the inauguration of Ram Mandir, some felt mocked in their language “Even though there were messages loaded with a religious tenor, which should not be there in a society’s WhatsApp group, there were also messages such as ‘Please burn crackers with caution since there will not be a Burnol available in the market.'”
A 48-year-old fashion designer resident from Viman Nagar in Pune revealed how she got a message in her society WhatsApp group reading “Everyone in the group should chant Jai Shri Raam to celebrate Ram Mandir, and those who do not do so are traitors to the nation” and that “Even though someone within the group objected to that message and the message was subsequently deleted, the idea of someone inside the apartment group ready to label us as traitors was terrifying.”
This is not the first time RWAs and their behaviour have been questioned. Recently, South Delhi’s Jangpura Extension’s RWA also sent a letter to former Union Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar and his daughter Suranya and asked them to apologise for a social media post that Suranya Aiyar made regarding a three-day fast to protest the Ram Mandir inauguration.
The letter asked them to “apologise or move out” and has further highlighted the power RWAs supposedly enjoy, making people question its validity. An Outlook India report also commented that these RWAs “often become vehicles of arbitrary and discriminatory rules about who can rent and who cannot. More often than not, these lines are drawn on the basis of religion, caste, gender or even marital status.”
In another report by Article that came out in 2021, brokers in Delhi said that they refuse certain places to certain kinds of tenants, including Muslims. According to them, Muslim tenants could be a possible “liability” and their name itself could be used to judge them.
The Tablighi Jamaat event during the COVID-19 lockdown was also reportedly used as a way to discriminate against Muslims, especially those looking for homes.
Along with this, the film ‘The Kerala Story’ also had an impact, where as per Outlook “a 20-year-old Muslim woman had alleged that she had been facing trouble finding an apartment allegedly because of her faith.”
According to reports, celebs like Urfi Javed, Emraan Hashmi, Aly Goni and more have also commented that they faced harassment in their societies because of their religion.
Image Credits: Google Images
Feature image designed by Saudamini Seth
Sources: The Print, Boom Live, Outlook India
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: RWAs, RWAs Muslims, RWAs Muslims WhatsApp, WhatsApp, WhatsApp groups, Resident Welfare Association, Resident Welfare Association delhi, Resident Welfare Association noida, Resident Welfare Association news, resident welfare association muslim whatsapp
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