As per the recent survey conducted among the property brokers in Delhi, by the Centre for Civil Society, live-in couples, Muslims and people from Haryana are among the ‘least preferred’ tenants by the Delhi landlords. The survey states that a vast majority of landlords specifically state their preference against tenants from certain backgrounds.
Unmarried couples are highly detested by the landlords as around 88 per cent of the landlords surveyed said they did not want unmarried men and women as tenants. They believe that it would be a bad influence on their children.
More than half of the landlords surveyed (56 per cent) expressed unwillingness to have Muslims as tenants. The reasons they gave for their preference for non-Muslim tenants related to the fact that Muslims eat beef. ‘Some also said that Muslims are unhygienic whereas others feared that they might have terrorist links’, the survey said.
Narrating torrid experiences of some of the Muslim tenants, the researcher Rishav Thakur told that one of the tenants was asked to vacate her apartment the day she finished moving in her luggage as the landlord ‘discovered’ that she was a Muslim. Another tenant had to hide their Muslim mother’s identity when searching for apartments because their broker advised them to do so.
The survey revealed that many landlords were open to considering Muslim tenants if they are from a good college or in a respectable job such as a professor at the university.