KARACHI: Chaos was witnessed outside Aisha Bawany College on Monday when several college teachers and students along with officials from the Directorate of Colleges attempted to enter its premises after a court had ordered reopening of the college.

As the government’s review application against a civil court order for handing over college’s possession to the trust was dismissed and the trust obtained the execution of this order in their favour last week, the management of Begum Aisha Bawany Educational and Welfare Waqf made it clear that it’s a private college now and the doors were open for the students, who were enrolled, but not for government teachers.

In a related development on Saturday, Additional Advocate General barrister Ghulam Mustafa Mahesar filed an application before the SHC asking it to take over the control of the college until a new trust was formed. Subsequently, a single bench of the SHC directed the civil judge not to proceed with the execution of his order regarding the possession of Aisha Bawany College to the Aisha Bawany Trust.

On Monday, officials from the Directorate of Colleges along with college teachers and students forced themselves through the gates and tried to break the college locks, said PRO of the Aisha Bawany Trust Imdad Hussain Shah while speaking to Dawn.

“We told them to show us the court order if they could provide one that can enable them to take over possession of the college but they only had an old document from the City Court. The court on Friday awarded us possession of the college building after several years of litigation regarding this matter. These people who are coming here again and again in the form of a mob need to understand this,” he said.

“We are a private college now. Though our doors are open for the students who were enrolled here, we are not going to keep the government staff. So kindly refrain from such tactics to shove them down our throats,” he added.

“Today, they used the students they had brought with them as a shield as they told them to block Sharea Faisal. It will not work. Giving exaggerated numbers of our college students to the media will also not help. We only have 1,050 students of which about half attend morning classes and half evening classes,” he said.

However, president of Sindh Professors & Lecturers Association (SPLA), Karachi region, said: “There are some 3,000 to 4,000 college students enrolled with them in the morning shift alone but they don’t seem to care about their future.” “The issue for these so-called trustees of this great institution of learning doesn’t seem to be education though but the plot worth millions on which the academy has been built,” he added.

Aisha Bawany was one of the colleges which had been nationalised by the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto government in 1972. When the government in 1986 decided to return the schools to their former private managements, they still kept the Aisha Bawany College with them.

Finally, the Aisha Bawany trustees’ board went to court for their college comprising some 17 rooms. When the case was decided in their favour, the court also ordered the government to pay the trustees monthly rent of Rs50,000, which over the years had added up to Rs8,400,000.

On Monday, the advocate general office wrote a letter to the chief secretary, education secretary, inspector general of police and SSP (South) to strictly comply with the high court’s order regarding the possession of the college.

Meanwhile, Director of Colleges Prof M. Mashooque Baloch said the trustees and their law adviser had their own interpretation of the situation while the advocate general had his own interpretation. “They may have the law on their side for now but there is a proper way to do things and when they got the possession they moved very fast and were too aggressive,” he said.

“We are challenging them in the Supreme Court now,” he said.—Shazia Hasan & Tahir Siddiqui contributed to this report

Published in Dawn, September 19th, 2017