UET rumpus

The closure, whether for an indefinite period or initially three days, of all of Peshawar’s five seats of higher learning – Peshawar University, Agriculture University, Islamia College University, Khyber Medical College University and the centre of recent trouble, University of Engineering and Technology – has equally been a cause of concern for students, teachers and parents. The abrupt springtime suspension of classes was necessitated by the collective anger of university students who felt furious at the death in coma of a fellow student on Friday. The mischief appears to have originated on the night between March 13 and 14 when two students in room No. 345 of Tribal Hostel III came to blows on the issue of playing a tape-recorder at a high volume. The trouble spiralled the following day when the activists of Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba and Pukhtun Students Federation reportedly fought pitched battle on campus with iron bars and sticks. As the hard luck would have it, the recently married final year student of mechanical engineering, Adnan Khan, hailing from Bannu, got critically wounded with head injuries and was admitted to the intensive care unit of Lady Reading Hospital, where he sank into coma and doctors futilely battled to save his life until Friday. In the midst of emotional scenes, his dead body was taken back to the distant southern district for the stunned bride whom a sudden twist of fate and turn of events had instantly rendered a widow for no apparent fault of hers.

In Peshawar, rival factions of students’ organisations ran berserk and broke furniture and hostel gates. Police made arrests and VCs sat ordering expulsions. United Students Alliance appealed to the authorities that action should be taken against an organisation whose activists stalked campus roads and acted as self-styled moralists and reformists. VCs of all the five affected universities should also be bold enough to brainstorm on the situation and send to the government the names of the employees, if any, who may overtly or covertly be responsible for fomenting the trouble.