'Degree's of deception

 

Why do politicians lie about their education so much? Many of their degrees seem shrouded in differing degrees of deception. 

I first saw it in my cadre, West Bengal. Back in 1991/1992, Mamata Banerjee was with the Congress and a fiery politician. Suddenly she decided to write Dr. Mamata Banerjee on all posters and wall graffiti. The then ruling party, CPM used their formidable machinery to check the records of all possible places where she could have obtained a doctorate, even an honorary one and came up with a blank. Then they went to town with it. So much so that Chief Minister Jyoti Basu used to mention it in derogatory terms in almost every single speech of his, even long after Mamata Banerjee dropped the Dr. bit from her name.

 

Hers was not a case in isolation.

 

In her election affidavit, Sonia Gandhi had claimed to have passed from Cambridge University. The affidavit stated that she holds a "Certificate in English from Lennox Cook School, Cambridge University, completed in 1965." She was grossly economical with the truth. She did attend a language school in the town of Cambridge but it was not part of Cambridge University. In May 2007, the Supreme Court of India dismissed a petition seeking a criminal case against her, ruling that her affidavit did not mislead voters and accurately described her language course rather than an advanced degree.

 

Then came a supreme Irani irony – Smriti Irani. While contesting for the 2004 general elections, her affidavit with the election commission stated that she had graduated with an arts degree in 1996 from Delhi University's School of Correspondence. In 2011 and 2014 affidavits, her highest qualification came down to Bachelor of Commerce (B. Com) Part-1 from the School of Open Learning/Correspondence (1994). In a “masterstroke,” she was appointed as the education minister. When the education bit became an issue, she doubled down saying, “In that kitty where people call me anpadh, I do have a degree from Yale as well… which I can bring out and show how Yale celebrated my leadership capacity.” It turned out that the Yale “degree” was a completion certificate for a six-day India-Yale Parliamentary Leadership Program for Indian MPs.

 

AAP law minister, Jitender Singh Tomar was arrested by Delhi Police on June 9, 2015 after an investigation by Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University in Bihar revealed that his provisional law degree certificate was fabricated and non-existent in university records. Some MLAs of AAP also faced scrutiny.

 

Gopinath Munde, former Minister in Maharashtra faced scrutiny when records indicated discrepancies in his claimed law degree from a college in Pune, which opponents pointed out was established years after the date he claimed to have graduated.

 

In his Lok Sabha affidavits for the 2009 and 2014 elections, Nishikant Dubey of BJP claimed to have a part-time MBA degree from the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University in 1993. However, he dropped this claim in the affidavit for 2019 elections. In a written reply to RTI query, Delhi University has clarified that no candidate named Nishikant Dubey was ever admitted to or graduated from their MBA program in 1993. He continues blithely as an MP and Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology. Given his proven capacity to misinform, he may be a shoo-in to be the Information and Broadcasting minister in the not-too-distant future.

 

The biggest mystery has been about the degree/s of the biggest person in India now – He Who Is Above Us All (HWIAUA). The entire matter has been cloaked in secrecy, misinformation and stonewalling. In 2016, Central Information Commission directed two universities to provide details regarding HWIAUA’s graduation and post-graduation degrees. However, instead of a simple compliance, the universities have tried everything to block the same. The documents purported to be photocopies of the degrees, presented by two Ministers in a Press Conference invited ridicule because there were serious anomalies and impossibilities in them.

 

Here’s the thing. Even if a lowly official in any government office gives any false declaration and it’s found out, he loses his job. And here are people declaring all kinds of things in their election affidavits and otherwise. Obviously, for the election commission, there’re separate rules for separate beings. A bigger question is, why do the Netas do it? There is no educational qualification requirement for becoming an MP or an MLA or a Minister. In fact, many people with humble educational backgrounds have turned out to be excellent leaders and administrators. I think, the Netas inflate their education probably because of some capability-anxiety.

 

It took me six years of very hard labour, hundreds of hours of poring over thousands of pages of material, hour upon hour of desperation and anxiety as to whether anything at all was coming out of all that, very generous help from the IIT Delhi academic ecosystem and so on to “earn” my PhD. It makes my blood boil to see some Netas casually appending a Dr. to their names. Such things should be prosecuted hard. Also, this entire scam called honorary doctorate, etc. should be banned.

 

Rahul Dravid has actually achieved mindboggling excellence as a player, captain, coach and so on. He turned down Bangalore University's offer of awarding him an honorary doctorate, saying, "The thing about the doctorate is that my mom did her PhD and earned a doctorate at the age of 55. My wife’s a surgeon who studied seven years to get a degree in surgery. And I’ve always felt that if it was something I wanted, I would like to have earned it. I don’t mean that anyone else should have that feeling and I’m not trying to belittle anyone else. It’s just that I felt that way because of my own experiences.”