By Sabah Gurmat
Ahmedabad/Vadodara: “It’s been four months now—we’ve lost a sibling, a daughter, and a home,” said 28-year-old Rifat Jahan, her voice tightening as she fought back tears.
A bespectacled woman whose voice shook with anger as she spoke, Jahan was seated in a corner of her aunt’s two-room home in Ahmedabad’s Gomtipur, part of a cluster of compact, concrete homes running parallel to each other along a narrow lane in the Choksi ni Chali settlement in the eastern part of Gujarat’s capital city.
As she spoke, she pointed across the narrow lane toward a house. It was there, on the afternoon of 9 August, 2025, that her 15-year-old sister, Saniya Ansari, was found hanging.
She had died by suicide, leaving behind a note naming six people. Her family believes that her decision to take her own life was not an isolated tragedy but the culmination of sustained harassment, violence, and institutional apathy.
This harassment, said lawyers, was in part enabled by a law that continues to shape housing and segregation in Gujarat: the Disturbed Areas Act, officially known as the The Gujarat Prohibition of Transfer of Immovable Properties & Provision for Tenants from Eviction from Premises in the Disturbed Areas Act, first enacted in 1986, after communal riots in Ahmedabad.
Initially intended as a temporary measure to prevent distress sales of properties by communities fleeing an area during times of unrest, it was reintroduced permanently in 1991 and has remained in force ever since, spreading across major towns and cities.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.