By Saiyed Danish, TCN Staff Reporter,
Muzaffarnagar: 18 year old Usman was a student of XII grade in Fugana when the riots broke out in the first week of September. The next day, he became a faceless name in the statistics of 70,000 people who were displaced post violence.
Any official document which could have proven his identity has now turned into flakes of ashes. His belief in humanity is a matter of reconsideration. His dreams have met a frustrating deadlock.
A mere look on his face betrays the unexplainable agony he exponentially undergoes. “I want to complete my studies, want to apply for a government job. I don’t want to work as a daily wage labourer as it is not something for which I took arts (Humanities) as my subject,” he tells TCN at Jogia Kheda where he has got temporary shelter.
It is in this search of an honourable life that he was lured by a fake advertisement appeared in one of the local newspapers of Muzaffarnagar which promised to get the applicants desk jobs at the Indira Gandhi International Airport complex in Delhi.
Usman, unaware of the fraudsters in the capital city, wasted no time and left Jogia Kheda excitedly for Delhi taking with himself all his hard earned savings he had managed to bring from his native village.
He reached Delhi and with a hope to materialize on the advertisement and contacted the number given in the newspaper advertisement.
“After I met the concerned person, he asked for all of my money in lieu of using his ‘approach’ to confirm my job. So I gave him whatever I had earned till now by doing small jobs or running errands during my school years,” he said.
“The man, who did not tell his name at all to me, asked me to wait for his call.” The call never came.
Usman had saved that sum of money to support his higher education although he knew that the amount was not sufficient enough even for a week to sustain him independently. He took a plunge and the preposition turned out to be fake.
He innocently asks, “Do such things happen in big cities?” Somehow he still has hopes of speaking to him although he had dialled the phone number of the man he met in Delhi several times but the lack of response from the stranger is nibbling away his patience.
“How to get a job?” he asks. “What courses are important to get a job like you?” he keeps on asking with imploring eyes.
Among thousands of displaced riot-victims, there are scores of Usman lying in many camps in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli. When many of such camps have been unjustly bulldozed by the police, victims like Usman, who was just another student in a school having no idea of communal violence before the fateful night of September 8, 2013, can do nothing than just seeing the day of his Board’s exams nearing. With no book to read and no answers to jot in the examinations missing which could mean losing government job he always wanted to do.