ABSTRACT
In May 2015, two new items about subject matters that one would consider the most basic and yet banal – housing and employment – hit the reading and watching public of India. What these two news stories had in common, apart from the fact that housing and employment are two basic fundamental rights of all citizens, was that both the cases involved Muslim youth from the largest cosmopolis in the country – Mumbai. Zeeshan Khan, an MBA graduate, was denied a job flat within less than an hour of his application by a firm because of his religion. 1 A few days later another incident from Mumbai again hit the headlines – this time about a young Muslim girl, Misbah, being thrown out of her house just because she is a Muslim. 2 These two incidents are not isolated incidents or mere ‘accidents’ in the Indian national landscape. Such discrimination is more or less de rigueur in contemporary times. However, what makes these two incidents stand out is that they somehow managed to capture the imagination of the national and social media and were catapulted into subject matter for major discussion in the days that followed.
