Sir Syed National School, part of an under-construction building that also houses a small mosque, stands at the junction of two narrow lanes in Muzaffarnagar’s Jaula village. It looks nondescript. Yet it is remarkable in many ways — founded in 2016 as a primary school especially for the Muzaffarnagar riot victims, the school has 300-plus students today. That’s not all. This year, over a dozen Hindu students took admission here.
The school is quite state-of-the-art: equipped with computers, audio-visual classrooms, and a well-stocked library. The campus has Wifi, solar power connectivity, and CCTV with night vision. The building was constructed using a ₹51 lakh donation from the staff and alumni of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) for the riot victims.
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When Lt. Gen. Zameeruddin Shah (retd.), former vice-chancellor of AMU, founded the school two years ago, almost all the students were Muslim boys from nearby villages. Now there are girls too, wearing hijabs over their sky blue-and-grey uniforms. “The school has students till Class V now, but plans to upgrade by one class every year till Class XII. It charges students a minimum fee and runs on a ‘no-profit-no loss’ basis,” Shah tells me.
The school gets the full support of both Muslim and Hindu communities, with students celebrating all festivals — from Independence Day to Rakshabandhan, Diwali and Eid with zeal. Prayers are recited in both Hindi and English; and Hindu students get moral science lessons when Muslim students are taking Quran classes.
The teachers — all with B.Ed degrees — stay on campus in quarters equipped with kitchen, dining hall and common room.
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The day I visit the school, Shah is there too on inspection. “I have especially come to meet Razia,” says Shah, entering the kindergarten class of about 50 children.
The class is headed by 28-year-old Razia Naseem, who hails from Bhajanpura in Delhi. Razia drives to the school in Muzaffarnagar, some 120 km from Delhi, on a scooter. She is the only differently-abled teacher of Sir Syed National School.
Missionary zeal
She tells me that the only reason she joined a school in a a remote and communally sensitive town, in spite of her disability, is because she wanted to do something for the kids who lost everything in the Muzaffarnagar riots.
“It was obviously a challenge to convince my parents. All the female staff members have this problem — nobody wants to send their girls to live all alone here. But it’s okay. I am happy here,” says Razia.
The eight teachers also teach around 50 kids from very poor families in a three-hour shift that starts at 3:30 p.m. after school hours. “The second shift is ‘Roshni’ — the ‘academic intensive care unit’ — for kids who cannot afford even the nominal fee charged here. Our teachers go from door to door to convince labourers and poor farmers living nearby to send their kids to the afternoon shift so that they can help their families while continuing their studies,” says Salman Jafri, one of the members of the school management committee.
Teachers work with missionary zeal in spite of the constraints of living and working in a remote rural region. No student takes extra tuitions. Almost all the students are on a Whatsapp group, something unusual in rural schools. And they are all set to launch a school app on August 15 with the punchline ‘Truly local, amazingly global’. “The school has succeeded in its aim of becoming a secular institution,” says Jafri.
Zoya, who is in Class V, was very happy when Vaishnavi, a friend from her previous school, joined her here. The two come to school and leave together. Maria, who is in Class IV, doesn’t like wearing the hijab — she says the teachers never ask her to wear it for the entire day.
“Hijab is only for the Quran class. For the rest of the day, the girls can remove the head-cover. It’s hot and we understand that students won’t be able to concentrate much if they are uncomfortable,” says Dania Riaz, one of the teachers.
The writer is a U.P.-based crime and political journalist with a penchant for human-interest stories.