Originally inspired specifically by my Third Year - Bachelor Of Mass Media students and created for them. Now open to all
Monday 29 April 2019
Narendra Modi's Educational Qualifications
Still speculative posts circulating about Namo's educational qualification?!! Please watch this video and circulate it widely, so that it is clear to everyone that Narendra Modi left home after completing school (Class 10) by his own admission.
He further goes on to say two things that he has not seen the "face of a college" and he did his graduation from Delhi University as an External student (Distance Education)
Similarly he says he completed his MA from Gujarat University i.e. as an External student.
A truncated version of the above video has been circulating for long, giving rise to speculation that Narendra Modi has not been educated beyond Class X. There are news of records giving details of his pre-science (equivalent to Class XII education.
Gujarat University has confirmed his MA - External (post-graduation by distance education), but is unable to provide details. Similarly, there are no verifiable records of his graduation from Delhi University.
An article by TheWire.in sums up the entire controversy, which is reproduced below.
The controversy over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s educational qualifications taken centre-stage once again after the Central Information Commission (CIC), acting at the behest of a RTI application by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, directed the Prime Minister’s Office to provide ‘specific roll number and year’ of the prime minister’s degrees from Delhi University (DU) and Gujarat University (GU).
The CIC said that this would help them locate Modi’s records easily, following which the universities could provide relevant information about his degrees to the public.
The debate over Modi’s educational qualifications started last year after various RTI applications seeking details about his degrees were refused by the universities and the PMO.
This had led to suspicion among Modi’s political opponents that he may have provided wrong information in his election affidavits. His election affidavits mention that he finished his undergraduate degree through a distance learning programme from DU in 1978 and his MA from GU in 1983.
The debate has fuelled yet another spat between Aam Aadmi Party leader Kejriwal and the BJP machinery. When did this controversy erupt? Why was the PMO reticent in providing information about Modi’s degrees? And what could be it political fallout? The Wire breaks it down.
Neither the constitution nor the Representation of the People Act specify minimum educational qualifications for getting elected as an MP or even becoming prime minister. So why is a fuss being made about Modi’s degrees?
The emerging controversy over Modi’s degrees is not about whether he his qualified to serve as an MP or prime minister but whether he made a false statement on oath in an affidavit that is a crucial part of the election process. Not having a degree does not disqualify a candidate in any way but if a candidate says he has degrees which he does not possess, then that would amount to having made a false declaration and misled voters.
When did the controversy begin?
Modi, in his affidavit for the 2014 general elections, acknowledged having been married to Jashodaben for the first time. In his earlier affidavits for the Gujarat assembly polls, he had claimed to be unmarried. This had led to a huge political furore in the campaign leading up to the general elections. Modi’s inconsistent claims regarding his marital status fuelled further doubts about his educational qualifications. Moreover, the controversy around Minister of Human Resources and Development Smriti Irani’s fake Yale University degree goaded many of Modi’s political opponents to probe his educational qualifications in 2015.
Consequently, a number of RTI applications were filed in the PMO, GU and DU to scrutinise Modi’s claims of education. His election affidavits in the 2014 parliamentary polls claimed he had undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Likewise, his election affidavits for the 2012and 2007 Gujarat assembly polls claimed the same.
So what was the response of the PMO and the two universities?
In response to an RTI filed on the matter, the PMO advised the RTI activist to approach the Election Commission of India (EC) and refused to divulge any information. The PMO said in reply to the RTI request, “The information about the PM’s education qualification is available on the PMO’s website http://www.pmindia.gov.in under the hyperlink ‘Know Your Prime Minister’ which can be accessed by the applicant,” and asked him to get the required information from the EC.
The EC too added to the mystery by saying that this information was not available with them and the applicant could access them by visiting “http://eci.nic.in under the head Affidavits of candidates.”
Following this, a Gujarat-based social activist filed another RTI at GU seeking details of his masters degree, which was again denied by the university. The university sent a one-line reply in Gujarati, “Under the RTI Act of 2005, this information can’t be made public.”
But the RTI Act allows for appeals if the information sought is denied. Was an appeal filed?
When the activist, who chose to remain anonymous, moved the appellate authority against GU’s reply, he was asked to file the RTI requests all over again and told the PMO was not obliged to provide any information if GU does not have the requisite information. The appellate body, headed by S.E. Rizvi, said, “A public authority is obliged to provide information, which is held in its records and, in the matter in hand where the requisite information does not form part of office records, the contention that the PMO should provide the same is not correct.”
The appellate authority interpreted section 2 (J) of the RTI Act to relieve the PMO from divulging this information. It said that since no minimum educational qualification was required to become the prime minister, the PMO is not under any obligation to possess details about Modi’s educational degrees.
The secrecy around Modi’s degrees was further magnified when DU also denied any information on his undergraduate degree details in April 2016. To Delhi resident Hans Raj Jain’s RTI, the DU said that the information sought is too general and cited its inability to find any information without a roll number. DU’s plea was accepted by the CIC, which dismissed the case.
Why did the controversy come to the limelight again?
After Jain’s plea was rejected, Kejriwal on April 28 wrote a strongly-worded letter to Chief Information Commissioner M. Sridhar Acharyulu.
“According to some reports (details are attached), Prime Minister Narendra Modi is preventing the concerned department from releasing details about his educational qualification. Allegations are being made that the PM has no qualification and degree at all,” said the letter, written in Hindi, which also questioned the CIC’s autonomy.
Kejriwal in his letter said, “Nation has the right to know the educational details of the Prime Minister. His educational qualifications should be released in the public at earliest. The RTI Act gives us the right to know the qualifications of the person holding the position of the Prime Minister.”
Thereafter, the CIC treated this letter as an RTI application and directed the PMO to give Modi’s roll numbers to the universities so that they could find out the details of his degrees.
“Not prescribing the education (degree based) qualification for contesting electoral offices is one of the great features of Indian democracy. What is needed is education and not degrees. However, when a citizen holding the position of Chief Ministership wants to know the degrees-related information of the Prime Minister, it will be proper to disclose. The commission directs the CPIOs of Delhi University and Gujarat University to make best possible search for the information regarding degrees in the name of ‘Mr Narendra Damodar Modi’ in the year 1978 (Graduation in DU) and 1983 (Post-Graduation in GU) and provide it to the appellant Mr. Kejriwal as soon as possible,” the CIC order said.
What impact will this controversy have on national politics?
Both Kejriwal and Modi have been attacking each other in public rallies for a long time. Apart from the public spat in rallies, Kejriwal has been accusing the Central government of intervening in the daily affairs of the Delhi government. His party has made it out to be a political attack by the BJP, which the AAP defeated in the Delhi assembly elections comprehensively.
In the recent past, Kejriwal and AAP have been the most vocal opponents of the BJP regarding the Union government’s handling of political and administrative affairs. Clearly, Kejriwal is trying to propel himself and his party as the political alternative to the BJP. The AAP’s long-standing campaign has been to target non-transparent governments, be it during the Congress-led UPA government, or now. The AAP has built its support base by rallying against corruption and opacity in governance. Therefore, Kejriwal has successfully catapulted the reluctance on the part of PMO to divulge details of Modi’s educational qualifications into a campaign against an opaque government.
In its political fight against the BJP, the AAP has relied not on big exposes against the government but on its small governance failures that have a cumulative effect on people. With the CIC granting Kejriwal’s request, it is a small victory for the AAP over the BJP. Kerjiwal’s deft handling of the issue of Modi’s educational qualifications is sure to get him more friends than enemies.
What happens if DU and GU are unable to confirm the award of degrees to Modi, or say categorically that no degree was awarded by them to Modi in the years mentioned by the prime minister in his election affidavit?
At present, giving false information on oath is listed as a criminal offence in the Section 191 of the Indian Penal Code. It says:
“Giving false evidence. -Whoever, being legally bound by an oath or by an express provision of law to state the truth, or being bound by law to make a declaration upon any subject, makes any statement which is false, and which he either knows or believes to be false or does not believe to be true, is said to give false evidence.”
A little bit of history on election affidavits may be worthwhile to understand the legalities of the process. Following a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms in 1999, election affidavits were first put in place after a series of court orders by the Delhi high court and the Supreme Court in the early 2000s. After these judgments, the EC made election affidavits that required each candidate to declare his/her criminal, financial, and educational background mandatory.
At present, the EC does not have any exclusive punitive powers if a candidate is found to have provided false information. There are no verification procedures to ensure that candidates do not provide wrong information in election affidavits. The ADR, an advocacy organisation for electoral reforms, has been demanding the Election Commission of India develop a proper verification mechanism for election affidavits.
However, given the constraints of time and resources, the EC has not been able to do much about it. Jagdeep Chhokar of the ADR told The Wire: “The EC does not verify.To our demand in the court, the SC had said that the EC should take the help of intelligence agencies to verify the information. However, the Union of India filed a petition in the SC saying that it should not be done. The EC gave an affidavit saying that it was impossible for it to verify information of so many candidates in such a short span of time.”
Chhokar said that the problem the EC faces is actually serious. “There are 7000 candidates in a general elections. In 15 days, you cannot expect the EC to do the verification. Following the EC’s and the government of India’s petition, the SC in 2002 said that verification cannot be done. Subsequently, we have been asking the EC to verify the information of only the winners within six months of their election. The EC has been saying that it sends the entire lot of affidavits to the income tax department for verification. However, the income tax department is not willing to do that.”
If the EC can’t act, are there other legal penalties for making an incorrect declaration in an election nomination-related affidavit?
At present only IPC Section 191 lists wrong information on oath as a criminal offence. The Representation of People (Amendment) Act, 2010 under which elections are held does not list out any penalty against submitting a false election affidavit. The courts have intervened occasionally. For instance, when Modi in his Gujarat assembly elections had left the column of his marital status blank, the SC, hearing a petition filed by Sunil Sarawagi in 2013, ruled that a candidate’s nomination can be rejected by the EC if a column is left blank. In his 2014 parliamentary election nomination, Modi was, therefore, forced to declare that he was married to Jashodaben.
The EC is demanding some reforms in the whole process but thinks that the verification of so many affidavits is not feasible. “The EC has no way to verify. We got only two hours to accept or reject a nomination. But what we do is to put all the election affidavits in the public domain so that citizens can themselves verify. However, we had been demanding that the EC may have some punitive powers for candidates who lie in affidavits. This will act as a deterrent. The Justice A.P Shah Law commission report released in February 2014 also recommends some of these reforms.,” former chief election commissioner S.Y Qureshi told The Wire.
The Law Commission has recommended amending the RP Act on the issue of filing false affidavits. It has said that false affidavits could be grounds for disqualification, that it should ‘qualify as corrupt practice under the Act.’ It also said that the maximum punishment prescribed at present should be increased from six months imprisonment to a minimum of two years. “Consequently, trials of cases in relation to false affidavits must also be conducted on a day to day basis. Further, a gap of one week should be introduced between the last date for filing nominations and the date of scrutiny. This would give adequate time to file an objection on nomination papers,” the commission recommended.
However, given the pressures it may create for legislators, it looks highly unlikely that the BJP-led government would implement these recommendations in the near future.
It is a widely accepted fact that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s fate in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections rests largely on its performance in the Hindi heartland.
In a recent article, we had reported the results of a prediction exercise regarding the outcomes of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh – the most populous Hindi heartland state. Our results showed that if voting trends in the recent past are good predictors of current voting patterns, then the BJP could lose 40 seats in Uttar Pradesh. In this article, we extend our analysis to five more Hindi heartland states.
While we would have liked to carry out the prediction exercise for all the ten Hindi heartland states – Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh – limitations of data prevent us from doing so. Our prediction exercise is based on extrapolating voting trends observed in the recent past.
Only six of the ten Hindi heartland states have had assembly elections in the past two years: Chhattisgarh (2018), Himachal Pradesh (2017), Madhya Pradesh (2018), Rajasthan (2018), Uttarakhand (2017) and Uttar Pradesh (2017). The other four states had assembly elections in 2014 or 2015. We do not feel confident of using trends on voting from so far back in the past.
The six states we looked at are immensely important for the BJP. Together, they account for 154 seats in the Lower House: Uttar Pradesh (80), Madhya Pradesh (29), Rajasthan (25), Chhattisgarh (11), Uttarakhand (5) and Himachal Pradesh (4). In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, BJP won 142 of the 154 seats from these states. Thus, these six states gave BJP exactly half of its total seat tally of 283.
How will BJP perform in these states in the ongoing elections to the Lok Sabha? To answer this question, we have used the same methodology that was the basis of our results in the previous article.
Our method starts by identifying all the assembly constituencies in a parliamentary constituency. Then we add up the votes for each of the major parties in the assembly constituencies that make up a parliamentary constituency. We do the same to get the total number of votes cast in a parliamentary constituency. Dividing the former by the latter gives us the vote share of each party at the parliamentary constituency level. We then use this number to predict the vote share for each party at the parliamentary constituency level in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. Finally, we choose the party or alliance with the largest vote share as the winner of the seat.
The results of our prediction exercise for the six Hindi heartland states are summarised in Table 1, and Figure 1 and 2. In each of these states, the BJP will lose vote share. The smallest loss in terms of vote share will be seen in Uttar Pradesh (2.8%), followed by 5.25% in Himachal Pradesh, 8.79% in Himachal Pradesh, 13% in Madhya Pradesh, and about 16% each in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. While the loss of vote share is important, its conversion in terms of loss of seats is more important.
The loss in terms of seats is much more dramatic. If voting patterns in the recent past are good predictors of current voting trends, then BJP could face a deficit of 75 parliamentary seats in these six states alone vis-à-vis its performance in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. It will lose the most in Uttar Pradesh – a total of about 44 seats. But it will lose significantly in terms of seats in three other states: 12 seats in Rajasthan, 10 seats in Madhya Pradesh and 9 seats in Chhattisgarh. It is only in the two smaller states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand that the BJP will manage to retain its tally of seats.
Although BJP lost only three percentage point vote share in UP, the loss of seats is disproportionally high. The reason is the mahagathbandhan or grand alliance comprising of the Bahujan Samaj Party, Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal. This alliance is likely to consolidate votes and put the BJP on the back foot. In other states, the contest between the BJP and Congress is almost bi-polar, and other parties do not figure prominently. Thus, in states other than UP, the loss of seats of the BJP can be entirely attributed to the loss of vote share.
Can our prediction go wrong? State-level voting patterns for assembly elections may not be repeated in the all-India Lok Sabha election, where the BJP, a national party, could gain more traction. The larger-than-life image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi still has purchase among the masses. And last but not the least, the BJP has more financial resources than its rivals.
While these points are important, in the specific context of the six Hindi heartland states that we have looked at, they might not have lot of salience. This is because, in all states other than UP, the fight is between the Congress and BJP, both of which are national parties. Hence neither can be ignored as a regional player.
In UP, on the other hand, the formation of the mahagathbandhan has created the possibility of nullifying the BJP’s advantage as a national party. The ongoing agrarian crisis, the negative shock of demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax, and lacklustre growth of employment opportunities have hardly been dealt with. If, as seems likely, these were the factors that prompted BJP’s poor electoral showing in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh four months ago, then they may have an impact on the Lok Sabha election results too.
How this debacle in the six Hindi heartland states will impact BJP’s overall performance depends, of course, on how it does in the other states (that we have not included in our analysis). But it is extremely doubtful that the BJP will be able to recoup, from other states, any significant part of this deficit of 75 parliamentary seats.
Notes: Computations are based on data downloaded from the website of the Election Commission of India. Predictions for 2019 are based on voting patterns in the previous assembly election. For the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, OTHER refers to SP and BSP contesting separately. The vote share and seats are given in that order. In terms of vote share, BSP got 19.6% and SP got 22.2%; in terms of seats, BSP won 0 and SP won 5 seats. For the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in UP, OTHER refers to the alliance of BSP, RLD and SP. For the corresponding election in Chhattisgarh, OTHER refers to the implicit alliance of BSP and JCCJ.
Deepankar Basu is associate professor in the Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Debarshi Das is associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.
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