Admitting Kashmiri students in Pakistan colleges part of radicalization plan

New Delhi: Pakistan offering scholarship for MBBS and engineering courses to Kashmiri students has remained a part of its strategic game plan to radicalize the youth and make them lean towards separatism. The lid over the murky intentions of India's rogue neighbour was blown off by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in 2018, while investigating different aspects of the terror funding case in Jammu & Kashmir.

In a charge sheet filed by the NIA in the terror funding case in February 2018, the investigating agency stated that there is a triangular nexus of terrorists, the Hurriyat and the Pakistan establishment that is patronising the Kashmir students in order to prepare a generation of doctors and technocrats who will have leanings towards Pakistan. Sending young students to Pakistan was managed by the Hurriyat leaders, the hawk Syed Ali Shah Geelani and the Hurriyat dove, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq. They were the ones who used to provide the students with letters of recommendations for visas.

"During the course of investigation, it was ascertained that students who were proceeding to Pakistan on student visas were either relatives of ex-militants or relatives of families of active militants who had indulged in various anti-national activities and had migrated to Pakistan or they were known to Hurriyat leaders," the NIA charge sheet had stated. Besides sending the relatives of ex-militants, the henchmen of Hurriyat leaders, used to take money from the affluent people to send their wards to neighbouring country for various courses. Their modus operandi was simple: They used to keep the money with them and certify that the family members of candidates being sent by them to Pakistan were somehow connected with separatist ideology. The biggest qualification for attaining a visa to Pakistan for studies was to prove that one had separatist leanings.

The NIA had seized a document from the house of Nayeem Khan wherein he had recommended a student for admission in a "standard medical college" in Pakistan because "her family had remained committed to the freedom struggle through thick and thin".