Srinagar: The management of Kashmir Law College, Srinagar, it has been learnt, has sacked Dr Sheikh Showkat from the post of Principal with immediate effect. The process to appoint the new principal has been initiated by the college management.
“Dr Sheikh Showkat has been a hard-line ideologue of Pakistan backed separatist organisations. In 2016, Dr Sheikh Showkat along with Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Arundhati Roy, Prof. SAR Geelani and others had participated at a convention titled – Azadi – The Only Way at Press Club of India, New-Delhi. Dr Sheikh Showkat 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,” sources said.
“The administration, it is learnt, has started a discreet process of ascertaining full details of the antecedents and past activities of Dr Sheikh Showkat who as per assessment was secretly in touch with elements of secessionist and terrorist networks to assist them in building up and sustain a false narrative that no good can happen until J&K 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 desperate to break,” sources said.
“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. Competent public authority are actively considering invoking relevant provisions of pension related laws that authorises 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,” sources further said.
“A complex auditing process has been devised by the authorities in higher education establishment 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,” sources added.