Walking down to a property consultant's office in New Delhi or Mumbai will not be a trouble for someone working in a multinational corporation with a handsome pay package when their current tenure with their house owners nears its end, especially when the house owner has explicitly stated that there will be a ten percentage hike on the current rent after a tenure of eleven months. 

Once you perch on a chair waiting for your turn in the small yet cosy office of a real estate agent, you make up your budget, plan a location, along with other requirements. When your turn comes the property agent would like to know the budget first and then your other preferences. Once you iterate the requirements he will most likely in a sardonic tone tell you that so much cannot be expected out of a rented place in a city like this, and if you happen to be a woman he will be making risque comments manifesting his anti-women and male-chauvinist thought process. 

Everyone living and working far away from their native places must have experienced such prototypes of property agents almost everywhere in India. These men are in huge demand since no house owner will rent off their property these days without any agent involved in the process, as the latter saves them from the paper works and police verification formalities. So, at every attempt to move into your perfect rented space, you need to encounter one property dealer.

Now comes the most important part, what is your name? Make sure that if your name is not purely in Sanskrit then you will be subject to utmost discrimination in this nation which showcases its 'secular' shell to the world. 

Suppose you are a Muslim, the second largest religious community after the Hindus, and you are looking for a rented accommodation in any of the metros including the self-styled progressive Calcutta or cosmopolitan Mumbai, and if your target area is not a ghetto typically assigned to the Muslims to live in confinement and total isolation from the main city, then you are probably at the wrong place. 

The delectable smile will soon vanish and a very confident voice will lower down to murmuring and you will be told, it is bit hard to get a house for a Muslim, to prove his point he will make some calls to house owners and ask them whether they would like to rent out to a Muslim. One after another upright rejection will make you feel more humiliated every moment and you will still be searching the same answer you have sought since childhood, is it a sin to be a Muslim in this country?

In most cities of India, Muslim people are denied the right of housing near those of the majority Hindu community; the utmost ghettoisation of the Indian Muslim inhabited areas reminds us of how Hitler isolated the Jews in the German society before forcing them to the gas chambers. Ghettos were his weapon and the modern fascists of India also relies upon the ghettos, as keeping the communal division wide would serve their long-term political interest and also support the cause of Owaisi and his brand of fundamentalist hate-mongers, who makes political fortune utilising the misfortune of millions of deprived and oppressed Muslims. 

The leaders of all mainstream political parties, since the days of British colonialism, slowly ensured that the British formulated 'divide and rule' policy is first implemented through housing demarcation. Hence, we have familiar terms like 'Muslim dominated' and 'Hindu dominated' areas in India. With both communities living in the same city as if in two different cities and incitement of communal riots becomes merely a task of rumour milling, as the communities live far away from each other and there is no chance of any mutual exchange of thoughts and views between them, forget checking facts and avoiding confrontation.
Recently the news about a Muslim girl been denied a rented accommodation in the cosmopolitan metro city Mumbai, a Muslim man denied a job in a diamond merchant enterprise due to his religion, and other such news of discrimination and Brahminical apartheid, created ruckus over social media networks and people started writing against the society and its norms, against communal discrimination. 

Many went ahead to blame Modi for the misfortune of the Muslims and minorities, while some as apologetics of the Hindu fanaticism, slowly blamed the Muslims for the miserable condition of the country (someone recall Hitler blaming Jews for all troubles of Germany and even its humiliating defeat in World War I), while RSS agents rapidly fired their hatred ammo against the Indian Muslim people calling them Pakistani agents (amazing! Pakistan is so economically strong to fund an agent network that surpass its national population!), in case few Christians protested the saffrons rubbished them as agents of Vatican City (now that is the smallest nation on earth to have the largest number of agents).

Though these incidents were only those that made its way to the national headlines as the victims used all possible methods to spread their story, many similar stories goes untold in the vast hinterland of India and no social media campaign ever takes cognisance of the agony of these Muslim people, except for some hawks like Owaisi and his brand of green fanatics who use every instance to strengthen and intensify the ongoing communal polarisation drive.

The fact is that Indian Muslims are very consciously denied the right to housing, job, education and other basic rights by the ruling classes of India that follows a Brahminical and fascist ideology firmly. I am leaving the topic of witch hunt of the state machinery, in which the Muslims are the most vulnerable targets as they fit the criteria of the ruling classes as a community which can be implicated in almost any crime, arrested and even imprisoned without trial for long durations. There are too many articles on the web regarding that topic, I will focus just on the social exclusion part, which is, of course, an outcome of the economic exclusion.

The exclusion of the Muslims serves the ruling bloc of capitalist-feudal land lord nexus, supported by foreign monopoly capital, two broad purposes. On one hand, they can farther their agenda of consolidating Brahminical hegemony throughout the society by depriving the minority communities along with the oppressed lower caste Hindus, ostracised Dalits and tribal people from the basic rights. On the other hand, they can create mistrust, communal hatred and incite riots to meet their goals of 'divide and rule' so that their masters, the monopoly-finance capital, led by the US-led bloc can plunder this country and its resources without any collective challenge from the people of the nation.

Muslim witch hunting is a global trend fanned by the US ruling classes, to ensure that the people of the non-Muslim world live in an environment of Islamophobia, as it serves the interest of the former to rule and exploit the whole world without any challenge.  The Indian rulers are just a small pawn in the global strategy of the American monopoly corporations and large banks, but due to their lies and deceptions, the Indian people are losing the scope of uniting and building a prosperous and democratic nation each day under the rule of a fascistic ultra-nationalist establishment that use religious jingoism and polarisation as their life support system.

Be it the Congress or the BJP, there is no change in the common attitude towards the Muslim community, the mistrust is planted within the mind of the children by their parents at a stage when the children are unable to critically examine their points or raise questions but believe unconditionally whatever is taught to them. This process continues as a cycle and the mistrust breeds hatred while hatred breeds discrimination and even to some extent the most inhuman atrocities on the vulnerable and poor minority community of India. 

The BJP did not begin teaching the people to hate Muslims or Christians, it is the pro-Brahminical ruling classes that started the process of teaching the people in a cunning way to not only hate Muslims and Christians, to not only write jokes targeting Sikhs, but also to despise and suppress the lower caste oppressed Hindus, the Dalits and the broad tribal masses of India. 

These are the very people who through their own print and electronic media, through their films and other mediums moulds the thought process of the Indian people, casts the negative image of a Muslim who is up to sell India to Pakistan, or a Sikh who is born fool, or a Dalit youth or tribe who is "grabbing the seats in premium institutions" from the upper-caste candidates. They keep glorifying the upper-caste Hindus, who are a minority in the Hindu community but owns nearly 75 per cent of India's private wealth and are exploiting the broad masses of the poor. 

The likes of BJP-RSS or Owaisi took these opportunities provided by the ruling classes to them to consolidate their own political fortune, which is directly proportional to  the extremity of communal polarisation of the masses. Unless the society and the economy as a whole provide these political factors with a platform to operate on, they would not have been able to develop a communally vicious environment from the scratches. Therefore, we can conclude that these political forces are not the cause of the problems, but the effects of the real cause, which is of course the socio-economic system based on a semi-colonial and semi-feudal economy.

The problem of Islamophobia and xenophobia is sourced from the uncritical acceptance of anything that flows in as an information, by the middle class intelligentsia of India, as the thought of the middle classes leaves a heavy impression on the thought process of the poor, who wants to imitate the middle class in their aspiration to rise a step higher on the economic ladder. 

Thus, the problem is sent downwards by the rulers of the society who are  situated at the top of the pyramid of Indian society. The middle class, educated in a semi-colonial educational system, are unable to question or critically examine data before drawing conclusions. A simple fake picture of a celebrity with a fabricated quote will be enough to shape their opinion about the thought of that very person, without critically examining or verifying the facts. This uncritical and mechanical aspect of thinking has become omnipotent due to the contribution of the education system designed by the British imperialism to generate clerks for their establishments during the colonial period.

The nation can be strong when the people of the land unite with each other in their common endeavour, the mere attachment of the land does not unite the nation. However, for the right wing fascists the question is always about keeping the land attached, as it generates revenue while the people are deliberately kept divided as their unity can harm the process of loot and plunder. 

That is the one of the principal reasons why since childhood the Indians are kept isolated within their own communities, they are forbidden to mix up with the children of other communities, love or even befriend someone outside communal lines. As that will challenge a well-established set up of the feudal landlords and the foreign monopoly capitalist nexus.

It is only the youth of India, who are capable to change the scenario, develop strong ties between all communities and give a befitting reply to the vile conspiracies hatched by the ruling classes. However, to attain such a stage, the youth must purge the filth that is injected within them by the vicious environment prevailing around them. They must have to first learn to examine facts and figures consciously from a critical angle and never to gulp any doctrine as an eternal truth. The youth must free itself from the shackles of the Bollywood as well as the print and electronic media propaganda, which though shows the shell of secularism, is deeply communal and anti-national in its content.

Education, which teaches critically examining facts and figures to arrive at a decision, the ancient Indian discourses of Tarkshastra, actually can help the youth to seek truth from the facts. Knowing matters by analysing them dialectically, by examining their components, features and qualities can help the youth to gain a deep insight into the state of affairs. They will be able to draw correct conclusions by studying the events around them and can make a better judgement on every issue.

Quoting Tagore's famous lines on this issue will not be superfluous, as this poem exactly depicts the needs of the hour:

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high / Where knowledge is free / Where the world has not been broken up into fragments / By narrow domestic walls / Where words come out from the depth of truth / Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection / Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way, Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit / Where the mind is led forward by thee  Into ever-widening thought and action /

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."