Opinion: Much Ado About PM's Degrees

William Shakespeare's 1599 comedy "Much Ado About Nothing" seems to echo in India's contemporary political discourse.

There is an attempt to stir up a brouhaha over Prime Minister Narendra Modi's educational qualification. Posters in Delhi by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) scream: "Kya Bharat ke PM padhe-likhe honey chahiye?" (According to AAP's Delhi convenor and minister, Gopal Rai, the campaign is spread across 22 states). The campaign started after Rahul Gandhi was disqualified from parliament following his conviction by a court in Surat (which he is yet to challenge though he has a month's window to do so). At a protest organised by the Congress, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said her "Harvard and Cambridge educated" brother was being victimised.

AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal shed his profound antipathy towards the Congress and on 25 March, while condemning the action against Rahul Gandhi, launched a diatribe in the Delhi assembly referring to Modi as "most corrupt Prime Minister... the least educated in the history of India".

"I don't think Independent India has had a PM who is a Class XII graduate," Kejriwal declared.

This is not the first time that Kejriwal has questioned Modi's education. His RTI application on this was upheld in April 2016 by then Chief Information Commissioner M.Sridhar Acharyulu (appointed by the UPA, the renowned academic now serves as the Dean of Mahindra University, Hyderabad). The order of CIC Acharyulu was set aside by the Gujarat High Court, which fined Kejriwal Rs 25,000 for seeking information that is in the public domain.

"Doesn't the country even have the right to know how much the PM has studied? An illiterate or less educated PM is very dangerous for the country," said Kejriwal.

Polemics apart, let us ponder facts. In May 2016, soon after Acharyulu entertained Kejriwal's RTI plea and sought details of Modi's qualifications, two senior Union Ministers, Amit Shah and Arun Jaitley, briefed the media and shared photocopies of Modi's graduation degree granted by Delhi University in 1979 and his post graduation degree from Gujarat University (1983), which stated that he had been an external candidate who had passed MA in First Class majoring in Political Science.

On the sidelines of the Shah-Jaitley presser, the media quoted then Delhi BJP MLA Naresh Gaur, who, as an RSS pracharak, had shared a room with fellow pracharak Modi in 1974 at the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) office at 33, Bungalow Road near the Delhi University North campus. Gaur said Modi had enrolled as a student in Delhi University's School of Correspondence Courses (now known as the Department of Distance and Continuing Education). Modi was arrested during the Emergency. Out of jail in 1977, he completed his BA in 1978, and was awarded a degree in 1979.

In 1990, popular Hindi TV show Ru-ba-ru hosted by Rajiv Shukla (currently Congress Rajya Sabha MP and All India Congress Committee secretary) had an episode on Modi, in which he asked him about his education. Modi replied: "Main koi padha likha wyakti nahin hoon. Parmatma ki kripa hai isliye shayad mujhe nayi nayi cheesen jaanne ki, seekhne ka bada shauk hai (I am not that educated. God has blessed me with the desire to learn new things)". He said he had left home at 17 after high school, and after some years, when he became an RSS pracharak, one of his mentors encouraged him to be a graduate and he became an external student. "Maine kabhi college ka darwaza dekha nahin," he shared candidly while providing details about his graduation and MA. Prompted by Shukla about his penchant for Information Technology, Modi described in detail his fascination for computers and the internet. Spurred by Rajiv Gandhi's initiatives in the 1980s, IT was taking its first, faltering steps in India. Modi had joined that journey.

Is formal education an essential qualification for a politician? Or for that matter, for a successful businessman or an author? Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore did not have a formal degree; though he attended prominent institutions, including the University of London, he chose to return home without a degree. Indira Gandhi had no formal university degree either. She dropped out of Vishwa Bharati University, as well as Oxford's Somerville College. Her education, like Tagore's, was mostly supervised by home tutors, though for a brief while she attended Modern School in Delhi, set up by nationalist educationists who had the blessings of Mahatma Gandhi and Tagore. Her mother's ill health came in the way of her formal education.

It may not be wrong to say that Modi is the most successful Prime Minister after Indira Gandhi and shares her background of informal education through what is now called distance learning. India's pioneering businessman Dhirubhai Ambani, who changed the paradigm and scale of entrepreneurship, studied till 10th grade and did not boast of a fancy university degree.

How relevant is a degree? Arvind Kejriwal is a highly educated person - he graduated in Mechanical Engineering from the elite IIT Kharagpur. He worked briefly as an engineer with blue chip Tata Steel and then opted to be a bureaucrat, qualifying for the Indian Revenue Service. He rose to be a Joint Commissioner of Income Tax and then quit service, plunging into the 2011 anti-corruption movement of Anna Hazare, which he split in 2012 to launch AAP.

Does Kejriwal's B.Tech (Mechanical) degree add any extra value to his job as Chief Minister of Delhi and chief of AAP? The cost of educating an IIT engineer is Rs 3.4 lakh per annum, of which the student has to bear Rs 90,000. The taxpayer and the aam aadmi (common man) subsidises this education at Rs 2.5 lakh per annum, which comes to Rs 12.5 lakh over five years.

Many IIT engineers seek greener pastures abroad or become bureaucrats or marketing honchos in the corporate world. Had Kejriwal, like Modi, chosen to devote his life to a political mission and completed his education as an external (now referred to as "distance") candidate, a seat in a prestigious engineering institution could have gone to a less brilliant, but diligent student keen to pursue a carrier as an engineer, contributing to India's technological upsurge. India's aam aadmi may not have regretted spending Rs 12.5 lakh on this.

Civicus, an international NGO headquartered in Johannesburg with offices in Geneva and New York, recently put out a list of seven countries, including India, where disinformation plays a crucial role in winning elections. As the General Election of 2024 looms, misinformation and disinformation missiles will be flung across the political horizon. The saving grace is that none of these allegation-based political moves find much resonance on the streets. Protest marches by opposition MPs begin at the gates of parliament and terminate a few hundred feet away at Vijay Chowk.

Unlike other nations, even neighbouring ones, India's protest politics do not resonate across the countryside. Instead of focusing on issues and offering a counter-narrative to the ruling party's agenda, innuendo and obfuscation is the preferred armoury of India's opposition. 

(Shubhabrata Bhattacharya is a retired Editor and a public affairs commentator.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.