On March 31, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal faced blowback from Gujarat High Court in a case where he had sought the degree of Prime Minister Narendra Modi under the RTI Act. The High Court came down heavily on Kejriwal and questioned the intentions behind seeking the details while the degree was already in the public domain. He was also asked to pay Rs 25,000 as a fine.
Despite being schooled by the High Court, Kejriwal and AAP leaders are consistently stuck on the matter and questioning PM Modi’s qualifications. Kejriwal is continuously calling PM Modi’ Anpadh’ and claiming that there is doubt about the educational qualification of PM Modi, and it could be the reason behind the worsening situation of the country’s economy. While making such baseless claims, Kejriwal either forgot or chose to ignore that under PM Modi’s leadership, India’s economy is now the world’s fifth-largest economy.
Interestingly, amid all the drama AAP leaders, including Kejriwal, have created, they missed out that Manish Sisodia, the former education minister of Delhi who also held many important portfolios apart from the position of Deputy Chief Minister, is not even a graduate. OpIndia accessed Manish Sisodia’s latest affidavit that he submitted to the Election Commission during the Delhi Assembly elections 2020.
As per the information provided by Sisodia himself, his education qualification was Diploma in Journalism from Bhartiya Vidya Bhawan, Delhi. Sisodia completed his diploma in 1993. Notably, it was not mentioned as PG Diploma that is done after graduation but as a diploma that is done after the 12th. As the Diploma is the highest education completed by Sisodia, it means the former education minister of Delhi is not even a graduate. The current education minister Atishi Marlena, who took charge only after Sisodia furnished his resignation following his arrest in a liquor scam, has done Master in Science from Oxford University in 2006.
Another AAP leader vocal about PM Modi’s education qualification is AAP’s Rajya Sabha MP, Sanjay Singh. He holds a diploma in mining engineering from the Orissa School of Mining Engineering. He is also not a graduate.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s education qualification
As per the affidavit submitted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections, he completed his SSC from Gujarat Board in 1967.
In 1978, he completed his Bachelor of Arts from Delhi University. In 1983, he completed his Master of Arts from Gujarat University, Ahmadabad. His graduate and master graduate certificates were put into the public domain by Amit Shah and Arun Jaitley in 2016 when Arvind Kejriwal started questioning the PM’s educational qualifications.
While Arvind Kejriwal and his AAP continue to allege that PM Modi’s degrees are fake despite the presence of the degrees and the recent high court verdict, one former AAP minister was actually caught obtaining a fake law degree. AAP leader and former Delhi law minister Jitendra Singh Tomar was arrested in 2015 on charges of cheating, forgery and fraud in obtaining his law degree, and his election was set aside by Delhi High Court in 2020. While Tomar had produced a degree from Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University in Bihar and used that to practice as a lawyer, the university in 2015 said that no such degree was issued to him. The university had filed an FIR against him in 2017 for committing fraud to procure a fake degree.
Another AAP leader, MLA Vishesh Ravi, was also accused of lying about his education, as he had claimed in his 2013 election affidavit that he had a BCom degree from Chaudhary Charan Singh University, while the university had said that there was no record of him studying there. However, in the affidavit filed in 2015, he claimed he has studied only till the 10th. He later claimed it was a mistake in the 2013 affidavit, and also said he was pursuing BA from IGNOU.
