I started studying Gujarat’s Disturbed Areas Act (DAA) in 2018. With the steep rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric after the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) victory in 2019 general elections, I started seeing the conspiracy theory under the false bogey of ‘Land Jihad’ appear very prominently in the political speech and in election manifestos of the BJP. The signs were very clear, and I had written that laws like Gujarat’s DAA will soon be enacted in other states. That, unfortunately, turned out to be true on March 6, with Rajasthan enacting its own DAA, albeit with something newer and more nefarious.Rajasthan’s DAA is an instrument for state‑led socio-spatial engineering to police “demographic equilibrium,” in a way that Gujarat DAA only gestured at under the euphemism of “distress sale.” By explicitly treating “improper clustering” of “persons of one community” as a trigger for state intervention, Rajasthan moves from covert segregation-by-bureaucracy to an open and declared project of managing where Muslims can live.Gujarat DAA, in its original justification, presented itself as a protective device. It stated that it aims to prevent “distress sale of properties in communally sensitive areas” by requiring the district collector’s permission to ensure that the seller is not acting under coercion. The law’s stated object, which was reaffirmed by the Gujarat High Court 2025, was to check whether a sale is a “distress sale” by someone trying to flee a communally fraught area, and not to maintain a religious balance of population or pre‑empt future “law and order” issues.Rajasthan’s DAA borrows the basic architecture of the state’s veto over property transfer in notified “disturbed areas,” but it does so while saying the quiet part out loud. Its preamble and ministerial justifications are not framed primarily around protection from coerced dispossession. They are framed around “safeguard[ing] the demographic equilibrium and social harmony of Rajasthan” against the “widespread impact of increasing population of a particular community, demographic imbalance, communal tension, and a lack of public harmony.”Under both regimes, once an area is notified as “disturbed,” transfers of immovable property require prior sanction from a competent authority or district collector, without which sales are void. But whereas Gujarat’s law still clings to the language of individual distress and fair pricing, Rajasthan normalises the idea that the state will decide when there are “too many” members of a particular community (Muslims) in a given locality.The conceptual heart of Rajasthan’s Bill is its definition of “improper clustering of persons of one community.” The Bill defines this as the “concentration or congregation of persons of a community in any locality or area” arising from “coercive, distress-driven, or otherwise unhealthy circumstances,” or which causes or is likely to cause “demographic imbalance, segregation, communal tension, or disturbance of public order, social harmony or the mixed-community character of the locality or area.”This language does several things at once. First, it folds any spatial concentration of a community into a security discourse. In this logic, clustering is presumptively suspect, either as a symptom of coercion or as a risk to “public order.” Second, it elevates the “mixed-community character” of a locality into something like a constitutional ideal which the state must protect even if that means preventing perfectly legal, consensual property transactions and residential mobility.Third, and most crucially, it grants the state the right to decide which concentrations are “improper.” There is no symmetrical concept in the Act of “improper dispersal,” or no concern that minorities might be scattered into vulnerability. The anxiety, the fear of small numbers, runs in one direction – “increasing population of a particular community” that allegedly upsets “demographic equilibrium.” The vagueness of “otherwise unhealthy circumstances” and “likely to cause” communal tension creates a wide field of discretion in which prejudice can be legally repackaged as neutral administrative wisdom.Supporters of such laws often invoke riot‑scarred neighbourhoods, arguing that state oversight of property transfers keeps opportunistic buyers from exploiting panic and further polarising space. Yet in Gujarat, the 34-year-long experience and my research shows how the DAA has in fact frozen and deepened segregation, been used even without instances of violence, and has denied Muslims access to housing – even in government-built housing. In Gujarat, Muslim areas and Hindu‑majority areas have become administratively fixed “disturbed” zones, within which cross‑community transactions are constrained and the existing majoritarian geography is preserved.Rajasthan does not even bother with this evolution from the lies of protection to majoritarian preservation. It writes the preservation of demographic composition into the statute from day one. An area can be declared “disturbed” if “improper clustering” has taken place or is likely to take place “with the ill intention of disturbing the demographic equilibrium of persons of different communities residing in that area in a manner that mutual and peaceful coexistence among different communities may go haywire.” The state is invited to detect “ill intention” in the aggregate decisions of families moving into a neighbourhood, and to treat demographic change and mobility – the most basic features of urban life – as a potential crime scene.Civil liberties groups in Rajasthan have already warned that this amounts to “legalised residential segregation,” pointing out that it will be minorities who face scrutiny when attempting to move into “mixed” or Hindu-dominated neighbourhoods. Moreover, since offences under the Act are non‑bailable and cognisable, and violations attract three to five years’ imprisonment and heavy fines, the state has declared that the risks of challenging the existing spatial order are high, and that the state will be on the side of those who wish to maintain the majoritarian status quo.One of the more chilling provisions of the Rajasthan DAA is the requirement for a Monitoring and Advisory Committee to conduct or organise “studies in the disturbed areas to ascertain from time to time whether the proper clustering of persons of the community is maintained.” This converts the mapping of residents’ religion or community – that used to happen illegally to plan anti-Muslim violence – into a statist function. Under the guise of checking “proper clustering,” the state can now monitor Muslim access and its denial to the city.Alongside this, the state will constitute Special Investigation Teams when complaints of “improper clustering” are received, bringing together the competent authority, a senior police officer, and the head of the relevant municipality. The routine movement of people in buying homes, renting shops, moving closer to kin or work, have been securitised. The Act empowers the police and municipal bureaucracies empowered to potentially reverse those decisions.Urban governance and planning has always had a political dimension. In this shameful legacy, Rajasthan institutionalises a directly communal calculus where the “right” mix of communities in each locality will be watched, measured, and defended by the state. In a context where planning permissions, infrastructure, and policing are already unevenly distributed, the power to label a neighbourhood “disturbed” becomes another lever for steering who can live where, and on what terms.Taken together, the Rajasthan DAA is not just a borrowed version of Gujarat’s law with minor tweaks. It is, instead, a more honest articulation of what such laws actually do. Gujarat’s statute worked under the cover of preventing distress sale and achieved segregation along religious lines. Going further in the project of Muslim ghettoisation, Rajasthan writes “demographic equilibrium,” “improper clustering,” and “mixed-community character” into the core of the law.That honesty should worry us. It normalises the idea that the state’s job is not to guarantee equal access to housing, security, and urban opportunity irrespective of religion, but to manage communal ratios on the ground. It invites officials, backed by police and punitive sanctions, to act as arbiters of where minorities may cluster and where they must remain “properly” mixed, under the permanent threat that their very presence in numbers will be construed as a disturbance.In an era when Muslim ghettoisation has already been produced by violence, flight, and informal discrimination, the Rajasthan DAA offers a blueprint for freezing and extending that segregation. It transforms urban space into a legal instrument for communal control and announces, with unusual clarity, that “demographic equilibrium” is more valuable to the state than the freedom of its citizens to decide where and with whom they live.Fahad is a doctoral student in Architectural History and Theory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He writes on architecture, cities, politics and culture.