Jammu and Kashmir’s minister for school education and former state Congress chief Peerzada Muhammad Sayeed seems to be in real trouble now.
The state police’s crime branch (CB) has reportedly concluded that there were some irregularities in the answer sheets of his foster son’s senior secondary examination which he passed in 2009. The evidence in the case includes documents about the use of dubious means and how answer scripts of Urdu and mathematics were written in two hands so as to enable him pass the examination.
It has also been reported that the candidate Imam Sauban allegedly resorted to unfair means during conduct of examination in connivance with the supervisory staff and officials of the Jammu and Kashmir Board of School Education (BOSE), particularly the then deputy director academics, who is alleged to have provided illegal and undue help at the best of the then secretary BOSE. While the action under law is likely be initiated against the erring officials, pressure on the minister who has been at the centre of several controversies in the past also to quit will only increase even though it is still unclear if he had influenced the officials.
Sauban is actually a child of the minister’s second wife, a medical doctor, from her first husband Parvez Ahmed, alias Biloo, who was a Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) militant commander killed by security forces during the heyday of insurgency. Mr Peerzada married her after his first wife died of a serious ailment more than a decade ago. Sauban, who ironically passed the Class 12 examination with distinction last month was involved in an alleged incident of transgression in the minister’s home constituency Kokernag a few months ago causing a huge embarrassment for the latter in public.