Ex-Youth Cong chief behind Kapadia’s fall

The anti-Kapadia campaign is believed to to be a ploy by former Gujarat Youth Congress president and Bar Council of India vice-chairman Hoshang Mirza. Mirza and Suryakant Shah, who was pipped at the post by Kapadia in the race for vice-chancellorship, ganged up to discredit the VC and yesterday’s event is seen as a culmination of their smearing campaign.

Mirza not only spent considerable time, money and energy in unearthing what he calls “clinching evidence” but also played an extra-constitutional role in the entire episode. The governor and the State government merely went bywhatever Mirza came up with.

Incidentally, before yesterday’s events, whenever the state government was quizzed on Kapadia’s fate, the standard reply was “all cases are sub-judice.” Well, they still are, but Kapadia’s fate has been decided.

Whether it was the `purchased’ Ph.D and D.Sc degrees from Sri Lanka’s Open International University for Complementary Medicine or the controversy involving his daughter Krishna’s dissertation, Mirza and Shah raked up all the charges when Kapadia took over. Interestingly, Kapadia’s claim that he could have become the vice-chancellor even without those two degrees was earlier endorsed by the government. One distinct feature about the entire episode was that not once did the government institute its own inquiry; Mirza spent a considerable amount from his own pocket on correspondence and fees to secure bogus degrees from the same university and on collecting proofs. Now that the vice-chancellor has resigned, the government may not hold the departmental inquiry atall.

Kapadia did his cause little good by coming up with statements like “almost 99 per cent of the students copy their dissertations” in the thick of the controversy over his daughter’s plagiarised dissertation. Kapadia’s inglorious exit has overshadowed all his positive efforts to bring the administration back on the rails. His efforts to introduce self-financed courses and institutions, for instance, bore fruit even in the face of a stiff challenge from the Mirza-Shah coterie.

If Mirza is to be believed, Kapadia was asked to resign even when Dilip Parikh was at the helm, but the Chief Minister sat over the recommendation. Ironically, the RJP government was supported by the Congress then. What Mirza could not manage when his party was supporting the ruling party has come about when none of them are in power.