Irshad Ali Naharwad
I am writing this on 17th April 2024 when the UPSC CSE final results were announced.
The Indian administrative services is my childhood dream, it is the most prestigious job in India with last year’s selection ratio of 0.07%. I left my pre-medical preparation for it, switched from sciences to humanities, and studied history at the prestigious Jamia Millia Islamia. There I was among the top 3 students. I subsequently qualified for UGC NET (eligibility test for teaching in college and university with a selection ratio of 6%) multiple times.
As a humanities student, I have been exposed to the theoretical concepts of various forms of discrimination throughout history. I also recognise the discrimination I faced from classmates from the very beginning of my education in school. In one such incident for pointing out the double standards of the city administration in a group discussion in social sciences class, I was labeled a Pakistani (a derogatory term for Muslims in India intended to mean traitor).
Like many other UPSC aspirants, I decided to go to Delhi to prepare for the UPSC exams. Karol Bagh in Delhi is the hub of the IAS coaching industry. Here the cost of accommodation is astronomical. I had a decent INR 10000-12000 budget for a single room with a shared kitchen and common space. The total monthly expense would come to about INR 25000, which is by Indian standards a very high amount because according to the “State of Inequality in India,” report by the Institute of Competitiveness, an Indian earning INR 25000 a month is among the top 10% wage earners of India.
There are various telegram groups to help UPSC aspirants looking for rooms or roommates. I messaged many of these groups with posts requesting a roommate and very few replied. At first, I did not understand why people were not responding to messages inquiring about a room and if they required a roommate.
Then interaction with two individuals explained the phenomenon to me.
I messaged the individual very courteously.
“Good morning, I saw your message about the room, is it still available? If so, please send me a few pictures of it. Thanks”
He sent me a video of the room. “I like it and I am interested” I messaged. He replied, “Ok”.
This was around 8:45 a.m., which is very early in the morning.
“Can I call you?” I messaged him at 9:00 am after consulting with my elder brother.
It is not uncommon to call and confirm the details of specifications. He did not respond, so I messaged him again.
“It’s confirmed I want this room. Let me know when you are free to call.”
Around an hour later he replied -“someone else visited and is also interested. I will inform you later in the evening.”
At around noon, I message him again:
“I want this room. I’ll send you the advance deposit right now to hold it for me until I visit it, in a day or two.”
He replied “paise ki baat nahi hai” (it’s not about money.)
I said “You want a roommate jab kisi bhi strangers ko rakhna hai then what difference does it make ki main rahoon ya koi aur” (if you need a roommate and you will most probably sublet your other room to a stranger what different does it make if it’s me or some else.)
To which he replied ’I am in class. I’ll talk to you later.”
I apologized for the interpretation and waited till evening.
At around 5:30 p.m. I messaged again explaining how much I liked the room and what a decent student I was. I laid down my academic qualifications to which there was no reply. I was left waiting.
While writing this message I felt very humiliated that I had to list my academic achievements just to rent a room to start my UPSC preparation, I did it with a heavy heart because I wanted the room to join the offline test series for UPSC preliminary examination. There is an acute shortage of decent accommodations, other available rooms were not liveable without any ventilation, no sunlight, and shared bathrooms with 4-5 people.
I had a similar encounter with another UPSC aspirant where he agreed to sublet a room in his apartment. Everything was set and we were to meet in the evening. But that person was constantly messaging in telegram groups looking for a roommate. We assume that if a person is looking for another client that usually means he wants to charge more money but this person was not asking for more money in those telegram groups rather he was offering it for INR 500 less than what we agreed on. When I messaged in the evening asking for the address of the apartment, he did not respond. He later messaged at night that the room was booked by someone else.
At first, I did not understand why anyone would not sublet me when I was the first to message. I thought, isn’t my money as green as others?
But the next encounter with a gentleman who had also posted about requiring a roommate cleared everything for me. Why were people not replying to me and were inventing a person or were frantically looking for one even after I had shown my intent to sublease their apartments?
I message this gentleman. “Good Afternoon, I saw your message about subletting your apartment. Is it still available?
The reply to the simple courteous message was something that felt like the earth slipped away from under me. in his reply, he explicitly said without mensing any words
I Quote “NOT FOR MUSLIMS”
Here it is to be noted he didn’t have to show his bigotry in explicit terms. He could also have taken the path of an earlier gentleman who invented an imaginary person or not replied to my message altogether, like many others who chose not to answer.
But this brandishing of his religious bigotry gives a clear insight into how mainstream and normalized religious hate and bigotry have been made in India, especially in the last few years of the BJP 2.0 regime.
To this bigoted reply, I had two options, confront him or just reply with the same message that I send to others in similar exchanges.
My reply to everyone: “I am sorry; not something I was looking for. Thank you for the video. Have a nice day”
To this, the gentleman’s response would be: “Okay, Thank you for the reply. Have a nice day.
I added another line to this reply. “May god bless you.” To show him that he might be hateful but it is not who I am. I have been taught to seek blessings for anyone with whom I interact whether he is my friend or foe.
My reply embarrassed him, he said, “Sorry bro.” I said “It’s fine” although it was not.
Me not confronting him is also an indicator that the minority community of India has been exhausted to the point that they do not have the strength now to confront every bigoted individual they find peddling hate speech on the street or in online spaces. We have to choose which battles to pick and which not to for it might lead to being lynched by the majoritarian lynch mob. Hence I did not confront him, online harassment is quite normal, and sometimes online harassment turns into actual physical threats, especially for Muslim women (I am not a woman but have been told so by fellow Muslim women).
Results for the UPSC exam for the most elite posts in administration, police, revenue, foreign affairs, and other such posts for the top echelons of different ministries were announced on the same day. I saw the results and thought to myself what some of these bigoted, aspiring civil servants have in store for the future of my country when they get into this service and become a part of the steel frame of Indian bureaucracy.
What hope does the future of India have when these people occupy the highest echelons of Indian administration?
Can we expect them to be true to their duty as public servants and have neutral opinions during communal tension? A few years back when I was pursuing my master’s degree, my university Jamia Millia Islamia was the focal point of such communal tension which started when the Delhi police barged into our libraries to trash students mercilessly for protesting against the discriminatory citizenship law against Muslims. I was saved by the skin of my teeth when I barely escaped the brutal crackdown in the university library by a few minutes. The merciless beating by the capital police resulted in one student losing his vision.
Can we trust them with the safeguarding of the marginalized community when they become IPS officers, usually responsible for the policing of a district, further these officers go on to become state police chiefs, and heads of central law enforcement and intelligence agencies such as CBI, NIA, and R&AW, I think not, given there is such prevalent bigoted thinking I don’t think they can be entrusted to safeguard the communities that are already marginalized.
There needs to be a serious discussion about preventing religious bigots from entering into the civil services of India. Too many times we have seen civil servants’ attitude towards a particular community. This will corrode the steel frame of the Indian bureaucracy on whose shoulders the Indian administration sits.
As a concerned citizen and an aspiring civil servant of this nation, I decided to do something about it. I changed my earlier stance. I asked a friend of mine, a journalist with Forbes India if he would be interested in this story. He said their magazine considers mainly financial stories. He advised me to contact another friend who writes for various online news portals like The Quint, wire, Al Jazeera, etc who might be interested in a social story.
But I decided against it and thought it was me who had faced the discrimination and who had been exposed to this bigotry. There are raw emotions that only I can communicate so I decided to write this myself.
Coming back to facing discrimination as a Muslim in India is not new but it was not so widely prevailing. I still remember one of my classmates in school branded me as Pakistani (a derogatory term used for Muslims to say that they are traitors), for pointing out the bigotry of district administration of razing Muslim neighborhoods under the garb of ‘encroachment’ as retributive justice by awarding collective punishment to the Muslim community.
Another incident that I remember, is when I came to Delhi for higher education at Jamia Millia Islamia, then too when I was hunting for accommodation I would be asked if I was a Mohammedan (a British expression for Muslim). They would do mental gymnastics and make the accommodation unavailable when I said “Yes, I am Mohammedan”.
Those who were slightly favorable to the idea of giving the accommodation to a Muslim would put unreasonable restrictions on my dietary habits, eating of non-veg and even eggs intake, who could come to visit me at my rented accommodation etc.
Of all the discrimination I experienced as a minority in India and as a student of history, one of the most absurd discrimination I found was religious discrimination. A person’s religious belief has no bearing whatsoever on another individual.
If I believe there is one god I don’t ask you to do the same.
If I pray five times a day in my room I don’t ask you to do so.
If I recite the Quran daily in my rented accommodation it doesn’t affect you, I’m not asking you to do so.
I can go on and multiply examples to show the absurdity of discrimination.
I was so disturbed by the events of yesterday I decided against going to Delhi and continue my preparations for the UPSC examination from home. If this has a bearing on my performance in the examination which I believe it will. Isn’t it giving an unfair advantage to the candidates of non-minority communities who can go there and get guidance from the country’s top mentors and coaching institutes, a privilege that I am being denied because of my religion?
I have a question for my fellow citizens of india-
”I look like you, you and I share the same blood, we have the same genetics, we eat similar foods, our culture and heritage are the same, our languages are one, our dress is one……… Then what motivation or reason does anyone have to discriminate against me? “
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Irshad Ali Naharwad is a UGC NET-qualified independent history researcher specializing in Post-colonial societies in the Indian subcontinent and beyond.
