Once razed to the ground in Emergency, a 65-year old roofless Urdu school now faces closure. Firoz Bakht Ahmed reports.
The Congress may have announced the creation of five minority universities in its never-ending quest to play the vote bank card, but it is unable to protect one school which caters to children from poor families in Delhi’s walled city, an institution once demolished by the party’s city elite in the heyday of the Emergency.
The Qaumi Senior Secondary School, a 65-year old institution which has on its rolls poor Muslim students from Sadar, Qasabpura, Quresh Nagar, Bara Hindu Rao and Kishanganj in the Walled City of Delhi, is in terminal stages of closure.
In the salad days of the Congress family cabal which ran Delhi like a personal fief between 1975-1977, the school was razed to the ground in the presence of then DDA Commissioner BR Tamta, Sanjay Gandhi’s friend Rukhsana Sultana and Jagmohan (now with the BJP) on June 30, 1976, on the promise of being rebuilt in the neighbouring premises: the justification was the construction of ‘janta flats’. The flats have long been sold out but the school never found space.
Temporarily, it was shifted to the Eidgah where it has remained since then. Now the Eidgah management has served an ultimatum to the school asking it to move after 37 years of existence there.
The Qaumi School was founded after Partition in 1948 when it was set up with funds raised by poor Muslim residents of the area. It was taken over by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi in 1960 as a primary school and in 1975 was raised to the higher secondary level.
Since its callous demolition, the school has perpetually faced an uncertain future. For one, it has functioned with minimal infrastructure; a few tents under tarpaulin sheets, a moth-eaten blackboard and creaky furniture passing off as a classroom. Vermin have not just damaged school records but have all but eaten away into the school’s now almost non-existent library. Nearly 70 percent of its furniture and equipment was stolen when the school was forced to shift in 1976.
During monsoon, the school practically closes down because of water logging. If that was not bad enough, a make-shift laboratory under a tin roof is blown away if the weather is inclement!
“Every time there is a dust storm, rain or a cold gust of wind, over 500 students in the ragged tents huddle together wondering when this official apathy will end,’’ says M Atyab Siddiqui, legal affairs secretary of Friends for Education, an NGO devoted to improve the lot of this hapless school.
The school’s manager Abdul Malik Qureshi says exposed to such natural vagaries it is students who suffer the most. Students report sick due to hot sand storms in summers and chilly winds during winter.
“The plight of students mostly drawn from families of book-binders, muezzins, imams, carpenters, box-makers and petty hawkers is pitiable,’’ says Atif Rasheed, a young BJP leader from Qasabpura.
Since 1976, students passing out of Qaumi School have not experienced a roof over their heads, a far cry from the time the 23-roomed five-storeyed building with more than 600 students in Sarai Khaleel area, was pulled down.
Senior economics teacher Furqan Ahmed says it is irreligious in Islam to run a school on Eidgah grounds. While the post-Emergency resettlement programme rehabilitated other residents and shopkeepers in Shahzada Bagh and Inderlok, nothing was done for the school – apart from a slew of hollow promises.
Naim Querishi, member of the Qaumi School Old Boys’ Association, says a memorandum accompanied by affidavits signed by thousands of residents of the Bara Hindu Rao area was given to the then President of India, Zail Singh and freedom fighter Aruna Asaf Ali.
He reels off an impressive list of VIPs who have been contacted for help: Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, Chandra Shekhar, Rajiv Gandhi, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, Sikandar Bakht, Arif Mohammed Khan, Tara Chand Khandelwal, Jai Prakash Agrawal and Jagmohan.
In 1991, Jagdish Tytler, then area MP and Union Communications Minister, tried to get school land in Dwarka, Narela or Pitampura but the plan proved unfeasible; poor students had no means to travel from old to outer Delhi. “We informed DDA that moving to the area allotted by them was akin to closing the school,’’ says ex-principal Azhar-ul-Hadi, adding, “most students are below the poverty line and come walking.’’
The Congress may have announced the creation of five minority universities in its never-ending quest to play the vote bank card, but it is unable to protect one school which caters to children from poor families in Delhi’s walled city, an institution once demolished by the party’s city elite in the heyday of the Emergency.
The Qaumi Senior Secondary School, a 65-year old institution which has on its rolls poor Muslim students from Sadar, Qasabpura, Quresh Nagar, Bara Hindu Rao and Kishanganj in the Walled City of Delhi, is in terminal stages of closure.
In the salad days of the Congress family cabal which ran Delhi like a personal fief between 1975-1977, the school was razed to the ground in the presence of then DDA Commissioner BR Tamta, Sanjay Gandhi’s friend Rukhsana Sultana and Jagmohan (now with the BJP) on June 30, 1976, on the promise of being rebuilt in the neighbouring premises: the justification was the construction of ‘janta flats’. The flats have long been sold out but the school never found space.
Temporarily, it was shifted to the Eidgah where it has remained since then. Now the Eidgah management has served an ultimatum to the school asking it to move after 37 years of existence there.
The Qaumi School was founded after Partition in 1948 when it was set up with funds raised by poor Muslim residents of the area. It was taken over by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi in 1960 as a primary school and in 1975 was raised to the higher secondary level.
Since its callous demolition, the school has perpetually faced an uncertain future. For one, it has functioned with minimal infrastructure; a few tents under tarpaulin sheets, a moth-eaten blackboard and creaky furniture passing off as a classroom. Vermin have not just damaged school records but have all but eaten away into the school’s now almost non-existent library. Nearly 70 percent of its furniture and equipment was stolen when the school was forced to shift in 1976.
During monsoon, the school practically closes down because of water logging. If that was not bad enough, a make-shift laboratory under a tin roof is blown away if the weather is inclement!
“Every time there is a dust storm, rain or a cold gust of wind, over 500 students in the ragged tents huddle together wondering when this official apathy will end,’’ says M Atyab Siddiqui, legal affairs secretary of Friends for Education, an NGO devoted to improve the lot of this hapless school.
The school’s manager Abdul Malik Qureshi says exposed to such natural vagaries it is students who suffer the most. Students report sick due to hot sand storms in summers and chilly winds during winter.
“The plight of students mostly drawn from families of book-binders, muezzins, imams, carpenters, box-makers and petty hawkers is pitiable,’’ says Atif Rasheed, a young BJP leader from Qasabpura.
Since 1976, students passing out of Qaumi School have not experienced a roof over their heads, a far cry from the time the 23-roomed five-storeyed building with more than 600 students in Sarai Khaleel area, was pulled down.
Senior economics teacher Furqan Ahmed says it is irreligious in Islam to run a school on Eidgah grounds. While the post-Emergency resettlement programme rehabilitated other residents and shopkeepers in Shahzada Bagh and Inderlok, nothing was done for the school – apart from a slew of hollow promises.
Naim Querishi, member of the Qaumi School Old Boys’ Association, says a memorandum accompanied by affidavits signed by thousands of residents of the Bara Hindu Rao area was given to the then President of India, Zail Singh and freedom fighter Aruna Asaf Ali.
He reels off an impressive list of VIPs who have been contacted for help: Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, Chandra Shekhar, Rajiv Gandhi, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, Sikandar Bakht, Arif Mohammed Khan, Tara Chand Khandelwal, Jai Prakash Agrawal and Jagmohan.
In 1991, Jagdish Tytler, then area MP and Union Communications Minister, tried to get school land in Dwarka, Narela or Pitampura but the plan proved unfeasible; poor students had no means to travel from old to outer Delhi. “We informed DDA that moving to the area allotted by them was akin to closing the school,’’ says ex-principal Azhar-ul-Hadi, adding, “most students are below the poverty line and come walking.’’
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