Smriti Irani: Bad Education

It is the season for college admissions and soaring cut-offs have left millions of students feeling stranded in the narrow straits of higher education. Perhaps HRD Minister Smriti Irani can sympathise with their predicament. Amidst the furore in the Delhi Assembly over former Delhi Law Minister and Aam Aadmi Party legislator Jitendra Singh Tomar’s alleged counterfeit law degree, the issue of questionable qualifications has come back to haunt Irani, the youngest and most controversial member of Narendra Modi’s Cabinet. Weeks after Tomar was arrested, a Delhi court on 24 June took cognisance of a petition against Irani alleging that she misrepresented her qualifications. The court will now examine the validity of the complaint and has scheduled the hearing for 28 August.

Irani, 39, was away in the Bahamas to attend a Commonwealth education ministers’ conference when the decision came. Even as demands for her resignation and an impartial probe started pouring in, BJP man Subramanian Swamy rushed to her rescue with this tweet: ‘Since Smriti has not been summoned it means the complainant has not yet proved there is a prima facie case. So for now Smriti has no issue’.

The issue, it must be said, isn’t as grave as in Tomar’s case. If proven guilty of faking his degree, this would amount to serious fraud and possibly spell doom for his career in law and politics. Irani’s case, which came to light last summer, is unseemly—mostly because of her gaffes at every step of the way—but it isn’t a disqualifier. Accused of furnishing conflicting details of her education in her two election affidavits, Irani is yet to clarify if she in fact completed her BA in 1996 from Delhi University or pursued a degree in Commerce. Or did she miss out on a formal education altogether? The complaint against her, filed by freelance writer Ahmer Khan, was spelling out the obvious when it said: ‘It is evident from the content of the affidavits filed by Smriti Z Irani that at best only one of the depositions by her on oath in respect of her educational qualifications is correct.’ A leak from the university’s School of Correspondence further heightened the suspense by making public particulars of her enrolment for an undergraduate course in Political Science in 2013.

The irony of an education minister accused of fudging degrees to keep up appearances wasn’t lost on her critics. Under siege, and in an act of desperation that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, Irani, after attending a six-day leadership programme at Yale, claimed to have a degree from the American Ivy League university. By the time she could clarify that her statement, intended as a witty riposte, had been misconstrued, she was already the butt of public jokes.

Indian politics has had several trysts with suspected bogus degrees, among them those of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Congress Vice- President Rahul Gandhi and BJP leader Gopinath Munde. Most recently, Maharashtra Education Minister Vinod Tawde found himself on a sticky wicket when the opposition grilled him over his BE Electronics degree from an institution in Pune which is not recognised by the Government. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis is backing him whole-heartedly. “There is no question of his resignation. He has never suppressed the fact that he had studied from this university or such and such was his qualification,” he said.

Irani may not have recourse to such redeeming transparency, and she could be prosecuted under the Representation of the People Act. But she isn’t one to shy away from a fight. She has picked a few, with colleagues and bureaucrats who have refused to abide by her ‘writ’. Not many Union ministers have elicited such controversy—and commiseration—in so short a time span. With luck, Irani can hope to linger on much longer.

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