Caught in the act: When fact is fiction and fiction is fact

By Rosamma Thomas* 

Siddarth Varadarajan, founder editor of The Wire website tweeted on August 27 that of the 56 retired judges who had reportedly signed a statement in defence of Union Minister Amit Shah, two that he personally knew – Justice RV Raveendran, former Supreme Court judge, and Justice Suresh Kaith, who served as chief justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, told him that they had no notion how their names appeared on that statement, when they had not consented to the inclusion of their names. This is a matter that needs some investigation – who included their names?

Mohit Chauhan posted on X the photograph of the young man who abused the mother of Prime Minister Narendra Modi from a rally of the Opposition parties in Bihar. The photograph shows the young Mohd Rizvi in saffron, standing beside Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan – so were people being deliberately planted in rallies of the Opposition to create trouble?

All this, just when Justice Sachin Dutta of the Delhi High Court, an alumnus of Delhi University, ruled that the matter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s university degree was “personal”. RTI applicants had sought records of Delhi University from 1978, which is when PM Modi is supposed to have sat the BA examinations, an overripe undergraduate at 28. 

It is pertinent to note that Justice Sachin Dutta is a former student of St Stephen’s College and Delhi University’s Law Faculty. After nine years, the court decided that since there are no educational qualification thresholds for employment as Prime Minister of India, there is no public interest in releasing such data. 

Delhi University had been routinely turning down RTI applications on grounds that the Central Information Commissioner had earlier ruled unjustifiable – because the postal order was not completely filled, for instance. The Delhi HC judgment repeated again and again that there was a difference between “public interest” and ordinary curiosity. It branded those who pursued this matter “busybodies” and “meddlesome interlopers”. It mentioned the “fiduciary” relationship between the student and the university, although the earlier orders by the Information Commission had noted that the degree is a matter of public record; the marks and degree etc are information generated by the university, not submitted by the student. Besides, examination results are routinely uploaded on Delhi University’s website.

As for fiduciary relationships – those that involve relationships of trust, what could be bigger than being the prime minister of a democratic nation as large as India? Is it justified for a man who wishes to conceal his education qualifications to hold such a public post, in a country where all government recruitment requires production of certificates? 

Actor Prakash Raj, who holds no university degree, said it was not wrong for a public figure to have no higher education; what was wrong was lying about it. 

Those seeking the information responded with resignation – the judgment could not have been different, given the circumstances. Yet, in a sense, the stalled RTI applications only served to confirm suspicion about the fake degree. Videos of Narendra Modi claiming at a public speech that he agreed that not everyone got ahead through education appeared again; the prime minister tells his audience that he had no higher education; that he had left home at 17, after education at the local village school. 

“All that remains is for it to be claimed that Pandit Nehru tore up Narendra Modi’s degree,” one satirist stated. One handle on social media site X explained that fiction cannot be the subject of an application under the Right to Information.      

Will this case now serve as a precedent? Will employers no longer be able to confirm data on educational qualifications of those they seek to hire from universities? Will it serve to deepen the problem of the proliferation of fake degrees in India? Will history books one day record the extraordinary case of the educational degrees of India’s three-term prime minister?

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*Freelance journalist. The photo shows Mohd Rizvi, the young person who abused PM Narendra Modi’s mother at an Opposition rally in Bihar, in the same frame with Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan (posted on X by Mohit Chauhan)