PM Modi's Educational Degree Should Neither Be a National Shame Nor a State Secret

If the prime minister did not get a particular degree, he should say so, for he has repeatedly stated that he is a chaiwalla's son who made his way up to power through grit and hard work.

PM Narendra Modi. In the background is an alleged copy of his Masters degree, released by BJP on May 9, 2016. Photos: Twitter/@narendramodi and @BJP4India.

Sayandeb Chowdhury, The Wire, 12 April 2023 : One of the standing clichés of my younger days was the two options a young male learner – male being critical here – would be offered by his aspirational and hungry-for-social-approval middle-class parents. The two options, as is known widely, were to become either an engineer or a doctor. 

But even those parents, closed to all other possibilities and unbending to the will of their ward, did not have the audacity or the imagination to ask their kids to aim for an entire engineering or entire medical degree. However, Gujarat University has issued a degree, ad-hominem, in ‘Entire Political Science’ to one Narendra Modi, who holds, de-facto, the most important office in the government. 

More than a prefix

There is no subject known as ‘entire’ political science or ‘entire’ anything, as anyone with the minimal exposure to education would know. But the university has so far refrained from issuing either a corrigendum to or a revision of this case of seeming duplicity. And whenever there has been a move to get some clarity on the matter, Gujarat’s courts have stonewalled it. 

In any modern polity, this should raise not one but hundreds of eyebrows and it did too, since it came to light a few years ago. But the issue is about more than the mere matter of a prefix. 

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal recently asked if a democracy should be considered in safe hands if its prime minister has not shown any proof of education. Kejriwal himself has not done much justice to his degree from the Indian Institute of Technology lately, but one cannot accuse him of forging it. And truth be told, governance is an immensely muddled, sinewy and formidable work.

Given the kind of authority Modi has vested in himself, it is a matter of serious importance to query whether he has any sense of the gravity of the office he is ensconced in, apart from the slighter matter perhaps of running (or at least pretending to) a country of India’s magnitude, messiness and complexity.

Why ‘fake’ it?

Frankly, one can always ask, what’s in a degree? Great leaders are a different matter, but even holders of key public offices have not always stood on the shoulders of degrees. An advanced degree from Yale did not prevent George W. Bush from going ahead with one of the phoniest wars (against Iraq) in recent history.

The traffic between education and public office is not one of predictable algorithms, but rather in the domain of cognitive application and incremental learning. So no one was dying to ensure that a degreed prime minister assumed office in 2014, just as no one has ever expected Modi to rival either Manmohan Singh or Jawaharlal Nehru in either institutional scholarship or scale of erudition.

It need not be, hence, a national shame, or a state secret. 

But if the current prime minister has not acquired a particular degree, he should have the gall to say so, for he has repeatedly peddled his version of the American Dream – that he wasn’t ‘to the manner born’, but made his way up the echelons of power through sheer grit and hard work. Why then be priggish about a degree, and when ensnared, forge one? 

Is it because Modi, who has the gift of the teleprompted gab, was unsure whether he could appeal to a wider demographic with his kind of upbringing? A report in a Kannada magazine in 1992 said that Modi’s colleagues in the ‘venerable’ RSS knew him as an engineering undergraduate. In the 1990s, that must have been the subterfuge for Modi’s acceptability, while in the 2000s, political science may have emerged as a safer bet. There is no certainty that he is either of them. But this does not satisfactorily reveal why he must be fraudulent about his qualification, unless he is a citizen of a fantasy ride like Everything Everywhere All At Once. 

Ironies of the situation

There are also a couple of ironies of gargantuan proportions in this situation. Modi has fervently sold the idea that India is ready to be a knowledge economy. To run this economy, one needs a supple, qualified and agile workforce. Now, what primary proof does an individual joining any workforce need? A legitimate degree, which may vary in repute, but nonetheless signifies the readiness of the candidate for the job. Everything else comes after. Any candidate who carries their degree certificate with an ‘entire’ happily parading as a prefix before their discipline will be summarily rejected. If someone is found to have done so while in a job, he or she would be sacked immediately. 

Moreover, Modi’s face hangs, like it does everywhere else, across giant banners during convocation ceremonies in most public universities. It is another matter that most of these institutions are ready to be conferred with their own degree in ‘entire genuflecting’, but students are still mostly diligent. So it is disconcerting if not downright farcical that a man with a public record of forging his degree presides – if not in person, certainly in absentia – over a ceremony focused on handing degree certificates to young citizens. 

The same thing is true for Modi’s rambunctious prattle about school exams, whether in books or broadcasts. But instead of it being a matter of shame, the nation’s leader mocks institutes of learning; belittles democratic conventions; babbles secretive sanctimony about his past while urging citizenry to bang steel plates during a pandemic; rambles about radars; mock-hunts for television spectacles; and announces a baseless demonetisation. Like Modi’s degree, any scientific or economic logic behind these proclamations are still at large. 

An image problem

Modi recently said that his detractors have outsourced a paid job (supari) to some foreign actors to ruin his ‘image’. Apart from the comical nature of the allegation, one would want to ask what ‘image’ he is talking about. He has, as is more than likely, lied under oath about his degree, and repeatedly so.

In India, the much touted ‘mother of democracy’, this should have been a crime of a constitutional nature. Yet no institution in the country has proceeded with criminal charges against him. That seems to be the entire political science of a banana republic. 

Sayandeb Chowdhury is an academic. The views published in this article are personal.