The Congress party on Sunday lambasted the Union Human Resources Development Minister Smriti Irani for “playing” with the country’s future while overzealously trying to implement “divisive agenda of saffronisation” handed over to her by her party’s parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS).
The party's national spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi, addressing a Press conference in Chandigarh, said: "Intentionally induced institutional paralysis and diffusion of education through myopic, malicious and myriad controversies have been the hallmarks of the Narendra Modi Government's one year in power."
She said that the situation had come to such a pass that the future of even the University Grants Commission (UGC) was shrouded in uncertainty. She alleged that rather than solidifying the well-established educational structure in the country, Irani had "spent more time in igniting fires, demolishing institutions of prestige, downsizing highly motivated educationists and dictating incomprehensible directives bordering on complete illiteracy".
Chaturvedi referred to the exodus of very senior persons from some of the most prestigious institutions questioning Irani's functioning and cited the resignations of Anil Kakodar, IIT Mumbai chairman, and an eminent nuclear scientist Raghunath K Shevgaonkar, IIT Delhi director and several others.
"MM Ansari, one of the members of the UGC, had slammed Irani for her excessive interference in the functioning of the commission and for taking arbitrary and abrupt decisions, while depending entirely on a well-planted bureaucracy and the RSS for running the Ministry," she pointed.
She said that the committee headed by Dr Hari Gautam submitted its report to Higher Education Secretary recommending that UGC had failed to fulfil its responsibilities and should be scrapped. Though HRD Ministry said that it was not accepting the report, it also said that office was yet to examine it, she added.
"Irani and BJP's disdain for Delhi University vice-chancellor Dinesh Singh was well known. However, HRD ministry faced embarrassment when President did not accept its report against Singh.
This clearly shows how the Government is reprimanded by the President for trying to level false charges against noted academicians to create vacancies for Sangh Parivar loyalists," alleged Chaturvedi.
The Congress leader also took up the ouster of NCERT director Parvein Sinclair two years before her term ended. "This development came at a time when NCERT was in the midst of reviewing its widely used school curriculum, also known as the National Curriculum Framework-2005," she said.
Reports stated that when Sinclair refused to toe RSS line on the NCF and other issues, she was charged, not allowed to defend herself fully and finally asked to resign, she said adding that it was alarming to think about the extent this government could go in order to ensure its mission of colouring the education system with partisan ideology.
She said: "Academic appointments are being made from under-qualified Sangh Parivar loyalists as heads of premier institutions of excellence."
She pointed that former editor of RSS mouthpiece Panchjanya Baldev Sharma was appointed National Book Trust chairman, a professed RSS Swayam Sevak Vishram Ramchandra Jamdar was appointed as head of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, although he was not among the four short-listed candidates for the post, besides many others.