STATE TIMES NEWS
JAMMU: After receiving a complaint from National Conference (NC), Governor Narendra Nath Vohra is understood to have asked Chief Secretary B.R. Sharma to investigate if an employee of the Jammu and Kashmir Bank (JKB), Saadat Hussain, has been simultaneously operating as the head of the State Government’s e-governance agency and a social media manager for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) under the nom de plume Ibne Battuta.
Well-placed authoritative sources revealed to STATE TIMES that Raj Bhawan has, of late, written a letter to Chief Secretary and sought his comments over the complaint filed by the NC over a month back. According to the complaint filed on behalf of NC by General Secretary Ali Mohammad Sagar, Hussain had been appointed by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s government last year as Chief Executive Officer of the Jammu and Kashmir e-Governance Agency (JaKeGA).
NC’s spokesman Junaid Azim Mattu had lately taken exception to Hussain’s attendance at a meeting, alongwith Director School Education Kashmir Dr Shah Faesal, with the PDP President Mehbooba Mufti and senior PDP leader Naeem Akhtar at Ms Mufti’s Gupkar Road residence in Srinagar after Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s death. Mattu had alleged that Hussain was none other than the person widely known as Ibne Battuta on Twitter. He had pointed out that many of Ibne Battuta’s posts had been virulently against NC and its leaders and the same had been directed by the party’s arch rival PDP. Following Mattu’s statement, Sagar filed a formal complaint against the JKB official. Both, Sagar and Mattu, complained that a State-run company, J&K Bank was paying salary to Saadat alias Ibne Battuta for running PDP’s political campaign against the NC and former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah. ‘How can a government-run bank pay an official for handling one political party’s campaign against another?’, Mattu had asked.
Hussain, a Scale 4 officer with J&K Bank, refused to respond to the NC’s complaint when STATE TIMES asked him if he was simultaneously holding two offices, including a political one. However, officials who worked in the former Chief Minister’s Secretariat confirmed that Hussain had been appointed as CEO of JaKeGA by the Mufti Government in 2015. They insisted that he was taking only one salary-from J&K Bank.
Sources said that Hussain has been associated by Crime Branch as an IT expert in the investigation a Disaster Recovery project of the State Government’s Department of Information Technology. Chief Minister Mufti, and former Minister incharge IT Imran Ansari, had ordered Crime Branch inquiry into the Rs 15 crore that had been allotted, allegedly in violation of codal formalities, by the Omar Abdullah government when the Chief Minister’s brother-in-law Asim Khan functioned simultaneously as Director of Software Technology Park, Rangreth, and incharge CEO of JaKeGA.
Even as most of the former CM Mufti Sayeed’s aides and the officials brought in on deputation from different departments and agencies have been repatriated by the Governor’s administration, Hussain alias Ibne Battuta has been holding his office in Civil Secretariat.
