Society

Amplifier Of Excellence

This year’s civil services topper and 164 other Muslim bureaucrats owe it to this centre

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Amplifier Of Excellence
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Shah Faesal had just begun to get used to being a celebrity when he returned to Srinagar from Delhi. But that didn’t prepare him for the homecoming Kashmir unleashed on its first civil service exam topper. It was extravagant enough to have gratified a war hero. The 27-year-old was mobbed repeatedly as he drove from the airport to his house in Gul Bahar Colony. Strangers entered his house to greet, hug and kiss him, and as Faesal puts it, “I realised my name was being mentioned in every Kashmiri home. It was like the phoenix had finally risen from the ashes.”

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The metaphor works at more levels than one. On a personal note, Faesal overcame the tragic death of his father at the hands of militants to first become a doctor and then top the UPSC exam. And for a state plagued by continuing violence and hardship, his achievement makes for a perfect tale of triumph over adversity. But even in the midst of his triumph, Faesal wants the media to go beyond stories of individual brilliance. “Someone who comes first gets the limelight, and someone who comes last gets the brickbats, but what about those Muslims who did not make it to the top 10? They are a story too,” says Faesal.

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If that larger story of Muslims striving and struggling, and in some cases, managing to make it to the civil services, has to be told, there could be no better place to start than the Hamdard Study Circle (HSC), a low-key institute based in the New Delhi neighbourhood of Sangam Vihar, where Faesal trained for the exam.With a few exceptions made for those from backward communities, HSC is essentially for Muslim candidates. Between 1992 and 2010, 165 Muslims have made it to the civil services via HSC. Professors from institutions such as Jamia Millia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University teach the students and HSC alumni who are in the civil services drop by to mentor these aspirants for the all-important personality test. What also separates HSC from conventional coaching institutes is that it provides students individual rooms to stay in and a canteen that serves them three  nourishing meals a day—all this for Rs 2,550 a month. Getting here is a feat in itself—an entrance exam is held in cities across India and usually only one out of every ten candidates makes it.

Standing beneath the wooden rolls of honour at HSC that will soon bear Faesal’s name in bold, a motley group of students who’ve made it here—ranging from Mohammad Akeel Khan, son of a social worker from Khalilabad in UP,  to Rifat Jahan, a mother of two from Doda—describe a life in rigorous monochrome. The talk in this hothouse, even over breakfast, is often about the questions that will appear in a mock examination to be held later that day. It is compulsory to be seated in the library until noon. Afternoons are spent locked in a room, cramming everything you can find about your chosen subject. Mentors then step in, helping students analyse answer sheets. Pointing to a group of students huddled over a textbook, one such mentor, Faraz Ahmad Qureshi, asks, “Where else would you find candidates with the capacity to study for 16-18 hours a day?”

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The backdrop against which an institute like HSC exists is the poor representation of Muslims in the civil services. Despite Shah Faesal’s elevation to poster boy, only 21 of the 875 candidates selected this year for the civil services are Muslim. Though the community accounts for 13.4 per cent of India’s population, the proportion of Muslims selected for the civil services in any year has never exceeded 3.91 per cent. “And that was in 2008, our best year,” says Prof S. Aftab A. Zaidi, HSC’s director, with a smile. “Of the 26 Muslim candidates selected from all over India, 16 were from HSC. Yet we still can’t break the jinx. Inevitably, Muslim representation in the civil services is always somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 per cent.”

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Set up in 1992, HSC was the brainchild of philanthropist Hakeem Abdul Hameed, who believed that educationally backward communities could progress only by creating leaders from within themselves. To turn his vision into reality, Hameed sought the help of Saiyid Hamid, a retired IAS officer and former vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University. Now the chancellor of Jamia Hamdard University, Hamid says, “We set up the Hamdard Study Circle because we wanted to convince the community that there is no discrimination in the civil services.”

If, despite their successes, the jinx that Zaidi mentions still exists, one of the main reasons, says Hamid, is that Muslims do not appear in sufficient numbers for these examinations. Explaining why, he says: “Apart from the small middle class, most other Muslims live in bastis where the din and dust would never let a student study in equanimity. Segregation has become so acute that I don’t see things changing very soon.”

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M. Abubacker Siddique, an hsc alumnus, stood 2nd in the ’94 civil services exam

But not everyone believes there is reason to despair. M. Abubacker Siddique, for one, is a delighted man today. Back in 1994, this HSC alumnus achieved the brilliant feat of securing the 2nd rank in the UPSC examinations, setting a record that has only now been broken by Faesal. The IAS officer, who is now the private secretary to Union home minister P. Chidambaram, says, “Finally someone has broken the record!” Giving a glimpse of the strong bonds that exist between the institute and its alumni, he says, “I still go back to HSC, and I was on a mock board that interviewed Shah Faesal. Faesal and I, we are the absolute evidence to show that the system is fair.”

As Siddique sees it, low recruitment of Muslims into the civil services is a matter of perception: “Any community needs to know that there is a good chance of getting through and doing well. Once you can see that happen, your numbers will start rising.” Creating more Siddiques and Faesals is clearly vital to changing perceptions, and in order to do so, Siddique says, HSC needs to widen the pool. He says that it should actually move away from the rigorous process of putting applicants through tests and introduce a canvassing system to find bright students and motivate them into giving the UPSC exams a shot. In order to do so, Siddique believes, what needs to be stressed is not the power echelons of New Delhi, but the power they will have to change things at the grassroots. “As an IAS officer, no post can give you more satisfaction than that of a district collector. You get to see things as they happen, and you get to intervene. Nothing can match that.”

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Back at HSC, Feroze Abdul Khan, the son of a pharmacist from Bulandshahr, echoes Siddique’s words while taking a break from his gruelling schedule of devouring textbooks to bounce a basketball for a few minutes. Initially attracted by the idea of driving in a car with a beacon, he has come to be convinced that the civil services will give him the chance to change the way people live. He says, “I could have done social service, but that has a limited impact. With civil service, I can better society.”

Rifat Jahan, meanwhile, doesn’t take breaks—it’s a level of commitment consistent with a woman who has left her husband and two young children at home just so she isn’t disturbed when she’s studying. “I am in purdah, but does that mean I can’t study or be part of an effective administration that would work for the uplift of women?” she asks before casting her eyes over the same page for the nth time.

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