IAS Dr gets pied-piper to banish stray dogs

Veterinarian bureaucrat getting US support to make a canine-free Valley

 Ahmed Ali Fayyaz

SRINAGAR, Feb 18: Jammu & Kashmir may one day make the best of use of the veterinarians in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Some of them are successfully passing off as Ph D scholars and MBBS degree holders, obviously for their inferiority complex. Skills of the fresh recruits like Dr Shahid Iqbal may take years to bloom but those of his seniors’, particularly Divisional Commissioner of Kashmir Dr Asgar Hassan Samoon, seem to be ripe enough for harvesting.

Samoon remained in news for his audacious outburst during Farooq Abdullah’s government a decade ago. In Radio Kashmir’s then popular current affairs programme ‘Sheherbeen’, this young IAS officer from an LoC village in Gurez, made it public that money was changing hands in most of the transfers and appoints for key positions in the administration. “I have been appointed as Director Food”, Samoon said on air, “as there were no contenders for this department that has been reduced to zeo”.

Under the orders of CM, who was in London, Samoon was immediately placed under suspension, though Chief Secretary Ashok Jaitley did his best to resist. Samoon’s ‘Mr Clean’ image one day forced CM’s heart melt. He was reinstated. He was taught another lesson when, as DC Anantnag, he scolded a cameraman of the State Information Department why he had gone to cover “a petty Minister’s function”. Sakeena Itoo taught him what she failed to drive home last year to DC Pulwama, Mohammad Afzal. That emboldened her to storm the office chambers of then Commissioner-Secretary Madhav Lal (now Chief Secretary) and break his lockers to pull out the “heap of pending files”.

Everybody in the government---Samoon, Sakeena and Madhav Lal included---is wiser by a decade today. Dr Samoon looks just inches short of Mohammad Tughlaq. Many of his colleagues in KAS and IAS have wasted their energies in churning the grapevine that backdoor entrant Tufail Matoo had been fired as Commissioner of Srinagar Municipal Corporation (SMC) for not allotting Rs 3 Crore contract of dog sterilization to a powerful woman’s kin outside J&K.

Dr Samoon, however, believes in doing more and talking less. Immediately after one Khursheed Ahmed Mir of downtown Srinagar claimed that he could scare away “all dogs from entire Kashmir” without killing them by poisoning and other popular means like stone pelting, Dr Samoon directed the SMC officials to allow him “to try his skills”. Samoon was kind enough on the ‘pied-piper’ who, of course, was not specific about domicile of the poor dogs to be driven away---Kashmiri, Indian or Pakistani. Samoon’s IAS colleague, counterpart Dr and Divisional Commissioner of Jammu, Pawan Kotwal, need not worry as all men and animals have been shown just one direction by politicians of all hues in the last six years---Road to Muzaffarabad.

 “The meeting was also attended by Khurshid Ahmed Mir, who claims that he can make all stray dogs to leave Kashmir Valley without killing them. Div Com issued instructions to SMC to allow Mr Khurshid Ahmed Mir, whom he nick-named Pied-Piper to try his skills in one or two Municipal Wards, on an experimental basis, subject to the condition that he does not do anything illegal and does not kill the stray dogs. Based on the success of the programme more areas can be allotted to him on experimental basis”, read an official Press release issued from Divisional Commissioner’s office.

It further revealed: “The meeting was attended by Commissioner, SMC Sheikh Mushtaq Ahmed, Additional Commisisoner Kashmir Abdul Majeed Wani, Health Officer, SMC, Dr Reyaz Ahmed, OSD with Div Com Kashmir, Aamir Ali, President, Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) Dr Gulzar Ahmed Nehvi, I/c President SPCA, Dr Gowhar Nabi Gora, Mr Sakib Qadri, Director Sapphiore Corporation (an NGO)”.

“In the meantime, Div Com directed SMC to make the Animal Treatment Centre of Animal Husbandry & SMC at Tengpora functional, so that male stray dogs can be sterilised there.

“SMC has arranged to train their staff in the art of catching stray dogs fro which a team of experts is arriving from USA from 28^th Feb to 4^th March 2011. These experts will train employees of SMC in the scientific procedure of catching stray dogs”.

END