By Mumtaz Alam Falahi, TwoCircles.net,
New Delhi: That a good portion of employed Muslims are in the unorganized sector in the country gets evident once one enters predominantly Muslim market areas or Muslim ghettoes in any city, including metro cities like Mumbai and Delhi and state capitals like Patna. The National Capital Delhi has thousands of roadside Muslim vendors, with their thick presence in Jama Masjid area, Chandni Chowk and Jamia Nagar.
In the shadow of historic Jama Masjid in Muslim-dominated Walled City (Purani Dilli) of the National Capital you can find hundreds of them – poor and landless, primary or high school dropouts and internal migrants – selling various items from caps, scents and Quran to dates, biryani and kabab to rings, combs and sunglasses. They – some for their own family while the younger unmarried ones to assist their family – are doing it to keep their kitchen fire burning.
When you enter Jama Masjid complex from the eastern gate overlooking the Red Fort you have already faced long rows on either side up to the mosque dotted with vendors spreading their merchandise on the pavement. Just steps away from the main mosque you have on your left a long white bearded man in late 60s or early 70s. Muhammad Islam has witnessed about 25 winters at the same place, selling Muslim caps. A quarter century couldn’t change his fortune.
“Someday I have good earning but on others it’s hard to get what could be said sufficient for two meals,” says original Dilliwallah Islam, father of four grownup children – all unemployed.
But the local municipal body Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), it seems, has been hostile to him since 1970s. His shop was demolished in 1976 in the neighboring Turkaman Gate area. He is yet to be compensated. And again in 2004 in a special drive for beautification of the Shahjahani Jama Masjid, his shop in the vicinity, along with 300 others, was removed.
Meet Zafar Khan, 45, of Saharanpur. For five years he has been sitting on the steps of the mosque, selling rehals (a wooden stand on which Quran is put while reading. Father of five children – three of them studying – Khan is doing a family business. Earlier his family of artists would make rehals, now he buys from the market and sells, earning around 100-150 rupees a day. He is also the victim of the MCD drive.
This is Irfan Khan, a Delhi native whose father and grandfather moved to Lahore in 1947 only to return to Delhi after a few months – when communal tension in the city had cooled down. Irfan, 40, sells items suitable to seasons. Nowadays he is selling winter caps and in Ramzan his space of business area is packed with Muslim caps, lungi and kurta-pajama. Despite his meager income of Rs 100-150 daily he is happy he is able to send their five children to school.
It is a fact as revealed by a draft report on “Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector” released by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) in 2007, that if Muslims are not getting good job it is because of three reasons. The report had identified them as three levels of vulnerability coming in the way of Muslims getting a good employment. They are low levels of education, poor access to land and their socio-religious identity.
When we talk to Muslim vendors we find them little educated (4.1 years of schooling is an average for non-agricultural Muslim workers in the country according to the NCEUS report) and landless. They are residing in Delhi either on rent or have left their family back in their native town.
Muhammad Aslam, 35, is 8th class pass-out. He has been selling dates for 15 years near the mosque. Earlier he had a shop that was removed by MCD, and now he sells dates on a hand-pulled cart. As he doesn’t earn much he has his family in Ghaziabad, his native town of Uttar Pradesh. He earns as much to make ends meet but is determined to educate his children who aren’t now of school-going age.
Teenager Abdul Jabbar has never been to school. He has done nazra – means he has learnt to recite Quran. He can read or write nothing else. Native of Godda in Jharkhand, Abdul Jabbar, the youngest child of the family, works as a salesman for a sunglasses vendor on the steps of Jama Masjid. He gets just Rs 600 monthly, with lodging and food facilities being provided by his employer.
Similarly little educated is 24-year-old Muhammad Shahzad who sells Muslim caps and scarves at Jama Masjid’s southern gate overlooking the Chitli Qabar lane. The 5th class pass-out Shahzad, a Saharanpur native whose family has now settled in Delhi, has been sitting on the shop for some years. Unmarried Shahzad is doing it to assist the family.
These vendors are different from their counterparts in Mumbai in two aspects. First most of them had once shops in the vicinity of Jama Masjid. They were removed by MCD as it chalked out a multi-million plan for the beautification of Jama Masjid and infrastructural development of its surrounding. These shopkeepers were allotted space in outer Delhi, mostly deserted and devoid of business activity. So they preferred to be vendors here than to be shopkeepers there.
And second – which is very much because of the first – that these vendors, unlike those in Mumbai, are little disturbed by the police and municipality. They know they are in pitiable condition as their flourishing businesses were given a break by the MCD move. The MCD plan is yet to see the light of the day.