What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
SRINAGAR: The management of the city’s Kashmir Law College has decided to remove its pro-Pakistan principal Dr Sheikh Showkat and initiated the process to appoint a new principal.
Showkat has been a hardline ideologue of Pakistan-backed separatist organisations.
In 2016, Showkat along with Pakistani sponsored secessionist Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Arundhati Roy, Prof. SAR Geelani and others participated in a convention titled — Azadi: The Only Way — at the Press Club of India in Delhi.
He was one among others who delivered an anti-India speech at the convention. Anti-India slogans were also raised at the convention. Delhi Police had registered an FIR under Sections 124 A (sedition), 120 B (criminal conspiracy) and 149 (unlawful assembly) in connection with the said convention.
The administration, it is learnt, has started a discreet process of ascertaining full details of the antecedents and past activities of Showkat who as per assessment was secretly in touch with secessionists and terrorist networks to assist them in building up and sustaining a false narrative that no good can happen until Jammu and Kashmir is part of India and the work and agenda of secessionists and their armed wings are legitimate and, therefore, required to be supported in various forms. He did all of this while being on the payroll of the very state he was plotting to break.
It is learnt that he has received about Rs 5.1 crores as salary and another Rs 3.3 crores as additional allowances under different heads. He also is in receipt of a pension of more than Rs 1 lakh per month.
A competent public authority is actively considering invoking relevant provisions of pension-related laws that authorise the state to forfeit pension when there is credible evidence of acting as a covert ideologue of secessionist and terrorist networks to justify violence and separatist politics projecting it as moral and desirable. A complex auditing process has been devised by the authorities in higher education establishments to assess and quantity the harm such persons have inflicted and to the extent, they have impaired the value and normal function of education institutions.
It is to be noted that when Narendra Modi visited Srinagar after becoming assuming the office, Showkat in an article had written: “After a gap of several decades, I was at the airport road on the arrival of an Indian Prime Minister. I was not there to welcome the prime minister but to hire a labourer so that I could avail myself the benefit of his services for some work in my kitchen garden. Once I settled wages with a Bihari labourer, CRPF men on the scene didn’t allow him to accompany me.”
“I was conveyed that no labourer would be allowed to go for work today. Within few minutes, all the labourers were bundled and boarded on a bus. They were forcibly taken to the venue of the prime minister’s speech. In view of the hostile attitude of locals, the easiest way to ensure an audience at Modi’s rally was to force the migrant labourers to attend it,” he had written.
He went on to say, “Two anecdotes of personal experience are indicator of the metamorphosis which Kashmiri attitude has undergone between Nehru era and Modi rule. The scenario is quite contrary to the perception concocted by beneficiaries of the status quo and can be substantiated by reference to other traits as well.”
