MUZAFFARABAD, Oct 13: Over two hundred young students staged a demonstration here on Thursday against police and the camps management organisation (CMO) for removing tents in which classes of their private school were being held.
Clad in uniforms, students of the Pakistan Public School shouted slogans outside the press club as their veiled teachers and representatives of private schools association stood beside them.
They were carrying placards and banners, drawing the attention of different organisations towards their “eviction and educational loss.”
“We are shelter less. Get us our tents back,” read one of the placards. Talking to reporters, patron of the school, Hazoor Imam Kazmi, said last year’s quake had damaged the institution’s own building and since then they had been holding some classes in tents on an open space owned by the public works department, close to the school’s premises.
However, he said, on Tuesday-Wednesday night a police party accompanied by a CMO official came and uprooted all the tents, saying that the government needed the space to erect tents for some survivors.
“They first loaded our tents in their vehicle but later threw some of them on the road,” he alleged. “They also seized and damaged furniture of the school.”
Mr Kazmi said he had immediately lodged an application with the city police station about the incident but the police were yet to any action.
“Yesterday, we held classes on the street outside our own building. But since the government and administration failed to do anything to address our grievance we are compelled to hold this demonstration,” he added.
He said the school was a non-commercial body as nearly 60 percent of its 300 students were being given free tuition and other allied necessities with the help of NGO Jammu Kashmir Peoples Welfare Association. Mr Kazmi, a senior lawyer and a free lance journalist, alleged that the act of the CMO was in revenge for one of his columns in which he had exposed their misdeeds.
“These tented camps have in fact become a source of money minting for the CMO, hence their existence suits it. When I exposed this very thing, they resorted to the condemnable step,” he said.