Chandigarh: What is the most distinguished feature of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Haryana home minister Anil Vij? Name the minister in the BJP government in Uttarakhand who is related to Haryana? Name the BJP MP from Haryana whose father died recently? Who contested on the BJP ticket in the Baroda by-election?
Who is Baby Rani Maurya?
Who is the Haryana state president of the BJP? Who is the finance minister and tourism minister of Haryana? Who is the president of Vishwa Hindu Parishad?
These were some of the questions that aspirants to the posts of 463 sub-inspectors in the BJP-ruled state of Haryana found themselves answering in the exam.
More than one lakh candidates appeared for the exam, held on September 26, in two shifts – men appeared in the morning shift and women in the evening shift. Both papers had 100 questions each.
The paper for the evening examinees also had the following curious question: which one of these four actresses (Priyanka Chopra, Parineeti Chopra, Mallika Sherawat and Madhuri Dixit) was present when Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Beti Bachao-Beti Padhao campaign six years ago in Haryana?
“We later searched on the internet and found that the actress who had stood with Prime Minister Modi was Madhuri Dixit. But so many of us failed to write the correct answer,” Meenu Joom of Rohtak, who sat for the exam, told The Wire.
“Most of us got it wrong because we thought it would be Parineeti Chopra as she was Haryana government’s brand ambassador for the programme,” she added.
Expressing disappointment, she further said that several questions were centred around BJP leaders as if most of the candidates were had intrinsic knowledge of the party and its functioning.
Joom’s concerns are valid because in such competitive exams, even a single question impacts the ranking of a candidate.
“I had thoroughly read the Indian Penal Code and police history before appearing for the exam. But there were hardly any questions testing us on Indian laws,” she said.
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Triviality uncontested
The name of the chairman of Haryana’s Gau Seva Aayog and the role of a sub-inspector may not be closely connected to each other, but not according to those who set the morning paper.
A question for the evening lot was: Who is the chairman of Haryana Board of School Education? This, too, is again linked to the ruling party.
Others:
Who presented the budget of Haryana for the financial year 2017-18 during the first tenure of the BJP government? What is the name of a former chief minister who was also the father of Karnataka’s newly appointed chief minister Basavaraj Bommai?
Another question, which was also entirely unrelated to the subject of the examination, asked which of these actresses (Priyanka Chopra, Kareena Kapoor, Manushi Chhillar, and Mallika Sherawat) is the daughter-in-law of a famous cricket player from Haryana.
The correct answer is Kareena Kapoor, wife of Saif Ali Khan whose father Mansoor Ali Khan was an Indian cricketer.
The sub-inspector exam also sought to know from candidates who the lead actress was in the Bollywood film NH-10.
However, there was a question in the morning shift paper which was not related to the BJP. ‘Khela Hobe’: in which state election did this word become famous?
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HSSC chairman apologises for ‘irrelevant’ questions
The paper even had a question on the chairman of Haryana Staff Selection Commission (HSSC) – the agency that conducted the exam.
“The chairman of HSSC is Bhopal Singh Khadri. What is meant by ‘Khadri’?” The options were: name of caste or community, name of family tribe, belong to Khadar area, or none of the above.
Talking to The Wire, Bhopal Singh Khadri said the correct answer was ‘none of the above’. He said Khadri is a name of the village in Chhachhrauli tehsil of Haryana’s Yamunanagar district.
“Affixing the name of the village is a usual trend among politicians in Punjab and Haryana like Parkash Singh ‘Badal’ or Om Parkash ‘Chautala’,” he said.
When asked what he has to say about the exam, Khadri replied, “I apologise for this exam. I do agree that many questions were irrelevant and should not have been there at all.”
“Even the question on me is irrelevant. We have already discussed the matter and sent a notice to the agency who prepared the question paper. We will possibly black list it after the agency replies,” he said.
He added that to avoid chances of a paper leak, a secrecy clause is mandatory which ensures that no one interferes with the work of exam paper setters. “But we never thought that the agency would include such questions. Next time we will make it mandatory that the agency which will be hired to set the question papers, submits a question bank, which will then be evaluated under strict secrecy to rule out any unimportant question.”
He further said that one should not politicise the matter and it is not as if the questions were deliberately included in order to benefit a political party. “The Haryana government is not happy with the exam. We will make sure that it does not happen in future,” he said.
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Several candidates ask to cancel exam
Another candidate who sat for the exam, Sandeep Singh said such questions are neither based on general knowledge nor do they have to do with recruiting sub-inspectors.
“We demand the state government cancel the exam and re-conduct it. It is a question of our future. Thousands of candidates appeared for the exam and how one wrong question would impact our ranking. There were several questions which were irrelevant and we had no idea how to answer them,” he said.
He further said that for a state that has so many achievements in sports, there was hardly any question on the topic.
“We are supposed to know personalities like Neeraj Chopra or Bajrang Punia, not ‘who is the BJP leader working as chairman of boards and corporations’,” he said.
Khadri, however, ruled out a re-exam. He said the exam was the same for all the candidates. In a few centres in Gurgaon, a different set of questions was distributed to around 600 candidates. “We are trying to figure out how to handle the problem,” he said.
