Gandhian institute falls foul of HRD Minister

The Ministry has now directed the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) to release money for the salaries but with a catch. It is to be disbursed not through the Institute but through the Planning Department of the UP Government. And the Director of the Institute is not be paid his salary.

The Gandhians suspect a conspiracy to deregister the institution as a prelude to its takeover. The tug-of-war represents more than an attempt to take over yet another academic institution since the BJP-led Government came to power. The Government is getting ready to celebrate JP’s centenary in two years’ time and a committee for the celebrations has been set up. Institutions involved in studies on JP will naturally be involved in the whole process. It was the Government of Atal Behari Vajpayee which had conferred a posthumous Bharat Ratna on JP last year. It was JP who had brought the then Jan Sangh into the mainstream in 1974 by associating it with his movement for total revolution. In the process, the party had acquired a certain legitimacy.

The fight in the Gandhian institute is essentially between veteran Gandhians like Bimal Prasad, till last month President of the Institute; Usha Mehta, who has been named his successor; Ramji Singh; and Acharya Ramamurthy, on one side, and Kusum Lata Kedia, a professor at the institute who is considered close to the RSS and is a favourite of Murli Manohar Joshi, on the other. Kedia is an aspirant for the directorship of the institute and two people close to her had complained to the Ministry about “financial irregularities, corruption and mismanagement’.

It was only after the intervention of President K R Narayanan and Vajpayee that the Ministry relented. Joshi justified his Ministry’s action by saying that besides the problem with registration, financial irregularities had been found during audit. Bimal Prasad denied this categorically. “The institute is a resgistered body and the registration is in order,” he said. In the course of two meetings with the PM and in several letters he has recently sent to Vajpayee, Prasad has said that all conventions have been set aside to teach the authorities of the institute a lesson to fulfil the “ambition of one member of the faculty”, Kusum Lata Kedia, who is facing charges of indiscipline and misconduct.

As for charges of financial irregularities, Prasad informed the PM that a three-member committee, comprising two people from the ICSSR and a ministry official, had conducted an inquiry last September. It had not found any financial irregularity but the report has not been made public.

Kedia made counter-charges. Claiming that the registration had been cancelled on March 30 this year, following raids conducted by the Registrar’s office in February, she said a special audit was ordered by the High Court following a public interest litigation. This had showed that the “society was dead, with no management and no elections” and, therefore, renewal of the registration had been done by “fraud”. The grant to the institute had been stopped, she said, because of non-compliance of the High Court’s order. She also alleged that no study on Gandhi had been carried out by the Institute between 1982 and 1997.

The ICSSR, the funding agency, reacts cautiously. Its Member-Secretary, Raktakamal Burman Chandra, said, “We don’t have any document to show that the registration does not exist or has been cancelled. We get to hear that there is a controversy on that.” ICSSR Chairman M L Sondhi pleaded for a way to “save the institute”.

Eight eminent social scientists, led by Rajni Kothari, have criticised the manner in which the HRD Ministry has acted.