Srinagar: A prominent law professor of Kashmir, Dr Sheikh Showkat Hussain, has been sacked from his position as the Principal of Kashmir Law College, a post he held after retiring from active service. According to sources, the authorities are also mulling forfeiting his pensionary benefits for allegedly pursuing separatist ideology.
"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 participated in 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," a statement issued by the college management to local media said.
Dr Hussain, a resident of Barzalla in Srinagar, is a prominent law expert who has served at various positions in Kashmir's law department before switching over to the central University of Kashmir. He also worked at Malaysia University for several years in the early 1990s.
"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,” local media quoting sources reported.
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“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 authorities are 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,” 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.
