On 28 November, 2012, after over 10 years of service in the Higher Education Commission, my father was unceremoniously, and illegally, asked to vacate his position. After failing to remove Dr Syed Sohail Hussain Naqvi from the HEC for the last few years, the government decided to assign the additional responsibility of the Executive Director of the HEC to the Secretary, Ministry of Education and Trainings.
In doing so, they have created a stalemate in the HEC since my father was appointed, as per law, by the full board of governors of HEC and cannot be relieved of his duties in this arbitrary manner. This is illegal because my father was recently given a four-year extension by the commission consisting of people appointed by the prime minister of Pakistan. Legally, the prime minister can appoint members of the commission, and that is where his powers end. Appointment of the executive director is the prerogative of the commission and not any other person or body, including the prime minister of Pakistan. Knowing this restriction, the Pakistan Peoples Party first tried to declare the original appointment of my father in 2004 as executive director illegal. This argument is, of course, ridiculous as confirmed by no less an authority than the best legal mind of the PPP, Aitzaz Ahsan, who stated that everything about that appointment process was absolutely legal.
I might be beginning to sound a bit long winded, but as the person in question is my father, people will automatically assume that my bias will skew the facts. I am simply trying to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the government is 100 percent in the wrong.
My father graduated from Hasan Abdal and topped his class, graduated Purdue University with a perfect GPA and got a PhD in refractive optics at the age of 25, was a tenured professor at the University of New Mexico before the age of 30, helped start up a company which made cutting edge machines that measured dimensions of nanometre sized structures, was the Dean of Electrical Engineering at GIK Institute of Science and Technology, VP of Operations at Enabling Technologies, and of course, Executive Director of the HEC for the past eight years.
Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules, nothing can take away what my dad has done for Pakistan. Arif Kiyani is definitely someone none of you have ever heard of. He has no relation to General Kayani, far from that actually. He first started to work for the University Grants Commission in 1989 as a driver, and was there when it became the HEC in 2002. He has often told me of how much he admires the conduct of my dad, but the best thing he said was “Sahab wo insaan hai jis ne aaj tak mujhe ‘tu’ tak nahi kaha”. Loosely translated, it means my dad is someone who has never once in all his years working with Arif Bhai addressed him by ‘tu’, a casual and sometimes disrespectful way of addressing someone.
I think it is fair to say that the HEC has had a tremendously positive impact on the country. This of course is not down to my father alone. Everyone from Dr Atta-ur-Rehman to the gardeners and security guards at HEC have played their part. That is not to say that the HEC is perfect. There is a lot of room for improvement, and no one recognises that more than my father. He is constantly striving to learn from his mistakes, take on the advice of others and grow and move forward.
SHAZIL NAQVI
Lahore