The CDA operation to reclaim QAU’s land from land grabbers on the direction of the Prime Minister and orders of the Interior Minister came into swing with its enforcement teams demolishing an illegal market in front of the university mosque a week ago. CDA teams also began demarcating the QAU land and the construction of a boundary wall around the campus resumed. In response and fearing eviction, the panicky land grabbers have also come into full action. Their immediate goal: to remove the university Vice Chancellor, Dr Javed Ashraf, who is spearheading the current campaign to recover the occupied university territory. And, they have found a willing collaborator; the Higher Education Commission. It appeared strange that, on January 10, a day before the CDA was preparing to launch its operation, the VC office received an email from the HEC that its three-member fact-finding committee would be visiting QAU to investigate charges of alleged administrative malpractices against the Vice Chancellor. This committee was created last year on 13th October and given a 15-day time to investigate these charges contained in an anonymously received dossier. However, no such investigation was done during the stipulated period, which expired on 28th October. In subsequent months till 10th January, the university administration did not receive any notice in this regard from HEC, or from the offices of the Chancellor/President and Pro-Chancellor/Education Minister. So impatient the HEC seemed that the very next day, on 11th January, when the CDA enforcement team was getting ready in the morning to demolish the illegal market that its three-member team arrived in the university and spent the whole day selectively interviewing some QAU employees listed in the dossier. Interestingly, it did so disregarding the Vice Chancellor’s plea that interviews should be audio-recorded and they must produce an affidavit before conducting these interviews as per Cabinet Division’s guidelines. Most prominent among those listed in the dossier and interviewed by the committee was the university Registrar, Dr Shafiqur Rahman, who has his own reason to see the Vice Chancellor leave office without delay. He was earlier sent on forced leave in April 2015, after the QAU Academic Staff Association (ASA) levelled serious charges of irregular appointments and promotions, including his own. In May 2015, the Syndicate constituted a committee consisting of two Selection Board members, former IG police Zulfiqar Cheema and former Finance Secretary Rana Wajid. The findings of this enquiry were completed and included in the agenda of the Syndicate meeting held in September 2016. However, rather than passing any resolution on the case or even discussing the report, the meeting decided to restore the Registrar. Two ex-officio members of the Syndicate, HEC Chairman Dr Mukhtar Ahmad and PML-N MNA Arifa Khalid, imposed this decision on its Chair, the Vice Chancellor, while an elected faculty member Dr Waheed Chaudhry was not allowed to participate in its proceedings. Since the term of the previous Syndicate had expired last month, the process to reconstitute the university’s topmost statutory body is currently under way. The enquiry findings in the Registrar’s case will again top the agenda of the new Syndicate when it meets next month sometime. The Registrar fears that his fate may be sealed in the new Syndicate meeting, and hence he and some QAU faculty members whose illegal appointments and promotions which he is accused of administering under the previous VC, Dr Masoom Yasinzai, are doubted to have authored the anonymous dossier that HEC is using as a pretext to exert pressure on the incumbent VC. Its fact-finding committee has also selectively interviewed the same people. It may be a mere coincidence that CDA’s demolishing operation took place at the same time when the defunct HEC committee conducted its interviews, and such circumstantial evidence may not be enough to connect the HEC’s hurried action with the panicky situation faced by land grabbers and the QAU Registrar. However, the HEC appears to have an axe to grind against the QAU Vice Chancellor and ASA, for resisting its attempts to intrude into university autonomy. A major dispute between the two sides is over the implementation of the Tenure Track System (TTS), which is now pending for adjudication before the Supreme Court. Several members of QAU’s TTS faculty were forced to seek legal relief when the HEC Chairman managed to force another decision on the Syndicate meeting held last September to make the process of the HEC endorsement of TTS cases from QAU more stringent. ASA’s stance is that under TTS Statutes, HEC does not have any right to endorse appointments of the university’s TTS faculty members. Insofar as Registrar Dr Shafiq is concerned, the evidence of his nexus with the land grabbers, unlike that of HEC, is more than circumstantial. For it was under him as Registrar and Dr Yasinzai as VC that QAU administration had lost the case against land grabbers in the Islamabad Sessions Court in 2012 and subsequently chose not to go into appeal against the court verdict within the stipulated period. While media coverage on land grabbing in the past month has focused on consistent appeals to various government leaders by the Vice Chancellor, ASA and QAU Alumni Association and CDA’s current operation in response, former university professor Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy is the only columnist who has hinted at the possibility of a compromise on this matter by previous QAU administrators, who, in his words, “had been persuaded – by what means one still does not know – to make no more than a token protest.” The land grabbing issue had first surfaced during the tenure of Dr Qasim Jan as VC in 2008 when a prominent local leader from PPP started building a large house and a link road on the university land. The QAU administration in the initial two years of his successor Dr Yasinzai, with Dr Shafiq as Registrar did pursue the matter – until 2012, when the QAU Employees Welfare Association (EWA), which has a sizeable number of locally recruited employees, especially from Mal Pur village, protested in favour of the land grabbers. This provided a pretext to the latter to force the VC and Registrar into compromising the court case. There are also rumours that former Vice Chancellor and current Registrar may have received some favours in return, including a Boarding School in Murree owned by Dr Yasinzai. Registrar Dr Shafiq, however, remains popular with the locals, as, on the day of his unlawful restoration by the Syndicate last September, he was brought to the office in the form of a procession that started from Mal Pur. Meanwhile, the land grabbers, including those who had illegally built the now demolished market, do not appear to be in a mood to surrender. In the past week, they managed to force the CDA enforcement team to quit its demolition operation against illegally constructed shops at QAU huts by stone pelting, and later blocked the Murree Road for hours as well. For its part, the HEC fact-finding committee has mostly collected one-sided evidence from QAU, in violation of official rules protecting university autonomy and months after the expiry of its mandated time. The role that EWA played before in forcing the former VC to concede space to the land grabbers is now being played by the HEC to nudge the current VC. Rather than extending a helping hand to him, the HEC apparently has chosen to hit him when, for the first time in years, the demise of this mafia is within sight. Instead, it seems to have joined hands with land grabbers and their cohorts in the QAU faculty, who are deliberately blowing the issue of drugs on the campus out of proportion to defame QAU and its Vice Chancellor – all hoping to reap the dividends of his departure; the sooner the better.