Jammu and Kashmir’s minister for school education Peerzada Muhammad Sayeed is reported to have submitted his resignation directly to Congress president Sonia Gandhi instead of chief minister Omar Abdullah to follow the convention.
A Srinagar newspaper Rising Kashmir has quoted an unnamed friend of Mr Peerzada as saying he has written a letter clearly stating that since the chief minister was involved in a “murder controversy,” he thought it better to turn to his party president instead to submit the resignation.
If true, this explains Mr Peerzada’s bitterness over the chief minister’s having referred a case of unfair means used by the minister’s foster son to pass senior secondary examination in 2009 in connivance with the officials of the Jammu and Kashmir Board of School Education to the Crime Branch (CB) of the state police following a report to this effect was published in a Srinagar newspaper recently. The CB corroborated the charge and with that the pressure on Mr Peerzada to quit only increased. The chief minister had said on Thursday that he has taken the matter up with his coalition partners in the Congress party as Mr Peerzada holds a portfolio allocated to the Congress and that a decision was expected by Friday. What may have also annoyed Mr Peerzada is the chief minister’s publicly saying that he “heads the department about which allegations have been levelled and that fact is inescapable.” When reportedly saying the chief minister was involved in a “murder controversy,” Mr Peerzada was referring to the death in mysterious circumstances of a ruling National Conference activist Syed Muhammad Yusuf Shah immediately after he was handed over to the CB officials by Mr Abdullah to investigate charges of corruption and fraud against him in October last year.
Earlier, Mr Peerzada had to resign in January 2008 also because of allegations of corruption. He was accused of demanding and accepting illegal gratification of `40,000 from an independent MLA. Before that, his name had also come during the investigations into the sensational sex scandal of 2006. Mr Peerzada had denied all such allegations and accused his political opponents of dragging his name in such controversies to run him down. Following the disclosure that his foster son had swindled to pass the Class 10 examination, the minister had said that the issue has been raked up to malign his image.