Former CS M Iqbal Khanday passes away
Srinagar: Former Chief Secretary Jammu and Kashmir, M Iqbal Khanday (IAS) passed away in Srinagar on Monday morning, family sources said.
Khanday who had resigned as the state’s Chief Secretary in August 2015 following differences with the then Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was not keeping in good health.
The 1978 batch IAS officer M Iqbal Khanday was appointed as the new chief secretary of J&K state in Feb 2013. The 1955 born had held various positions in the state government before taking up the top job.
Khanday, one of the very few IAS officers held a number of positions in different capacities. He was first appointed as a Deputy Commissioner, a director and then headed planning – for a long time, tourism, health, home, finance, R&B, besides heading the IMPA. He was principle secretary to the former chief minister Mufti Sayeed.
Khanday was highly competent and an upright officer, as his colleagues would often describe him.
Khanday was the third officer from Jammu and Kashmir to rise to the position of the CS. But he is the first direct IAS recruit from Kashmir who could make it.
Khanday was troubled by his health since the past several years now when he contracted cancer. He had to pass though critical surgery in advanced stage-III of lung cancer and a recurrence involving other organs more than twice at Tata Memorial Hospital Mumbai and Sloan Kettering Cancer Center New York in 1995-97. Extensive recurrence of the malignant disease in April 1997 had involved his chest wall, ribs and pleura.
Khanday also made headlines when CBI arrested him in the sensational sleaze racket in 2006. He was finally absolved of all charges by the trial court in Chandigarh.
Khanday’s worst tragedy of his life, however, was the death of his son Sajid Iqbal (born June 19, 1984), the 28 year-old budding lawyer, who was killed in a road accident near Awantipora in the dead of a night in May 2011 when his car bumped into a tree.
KV Network
