Letting out houses to Muslims & other groups of people

Letting out houses to Muslims

(or more precisely, not letting out houses to Muslims)

Today, I was watching on TV (CNN-IBN) a very interesting discussion - Virtually the entire prime time was focussed almost exclusively on a self-admittedly selective survey of landlords claiming to be reluctant or unwilling to give their houses to Muslims on rent in Mumbai, Delhi, Noida & Gurgaon.

Almost all the people on the panels were essentially being politically correct and claiming that it is indeed "something wrong, regrettable, and almost bordering on a criminal act".

Laughable, indeed, if one were to look at the ground reality.

When a typical middle-class Indian wants to let out his/her house on rent, what are the typical priorities? Here are some ideas that come to my mind:

• Regular receipt of reasonable rent, along with equally regular periodic increases in rent
• A tenant who will vacate the house on request from the landlord
• A tenant who will maintain the house reasonably well
• A tenant who does not create problems for the landlord directly
• A tenant who does not create any meaningful problems for immediate neighbours (who may be close friends or relatives of the landlord, with years of past acquaintance)

Keeping the above in mind, if I were to be a typical ordinary landlord, I would refrain or at least think a hundred times before giving my house on rent to a whole host of groups of people for one or more of the above priorities being likely to be violated:

• People from other countries
• Bachelors
• Spinsters
• Members of specific professions like Politicians, Lawyers, Journalists, Policemen, TV / Film persons, Air Hostesses, Employees of a Hotel / Bar / Mortuary, etc.
• Single women / men of any kind
• Couple living together without a marital relationship
• Gays / Lesbians
• People with a "problem" family member (the "problem" can be real or imaginary - and may potentially include people with certain specific disabilities, diseases, habits, etc.)
• People with "Large families"
• People from a community / religion / sect / caste / social class that is completely different from that of my immediate neighbours
• People from a "completely different" geographic location
• People with unwed parents
• People working in graveyard shifts
• Divorcees
• Ex-convicts
• People who have civil or criminal cases pending against them
• People against whom criminal cases have ever been filed in the past
• Social activists of any kind

If we were to logically think through the whole matter, each of the above is driven by a very strong bias, prejudice, unstated fear. Most often, the reasons, though unreasonable and unpalatable, are neither improbable nor illogical.

At the root of it all, we must realise that when we let out a house, we are doing so just to get an income from a property bought with our hard-earned money. We certainly would not be keen on inviting any trouble by doing so, especially when we have an alternative of very easily locating a perfectly "normal" tenant - a typical young married couple with one or two kids, with a steady income and middle class mentality, or, a simple retired senior citizen couple whose children have settled overseas with a software job!

For all those people who talk from Ivory Towers about an egalitarian society where we ought not to discriminate while choosing our own tenants, I just have to say the following:

• Please buy your own house and LET OUT THAT HOUSE to exactly the kind of person to whom you wish to do so. And let me do likewise with my own house.

Regards,

N

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