Regime change in ICHR but chief stays

The Indian Council for Historical Research was overhauled today and another bunch of Left-leaning historians, led by K N Panikkar, found their way in. Interestingly, one person who survived the changes was Joshi appointee Prof D N Tripathi, who continues as the chairman of the research institution.

Tripathi, who is now being accused by the BJP camp of switching sides, is among the handful of Joshi’s boys to survive the weeding out exercise.

Like Tripathi, all top officials at the University Grants Commission have survived the scare. So have the bosses of two other crucial institutions, the University Grants Commission and the National Institute of Open Schooling.

HRD bureaucrats say that changing the top personnel at UGC is difficult because they are selected through an elaborate search committee process. Otherwise, it would have been the ideal head-hunting ground for Singh. Maybe the current chairman, Arun Nigevekar would have been given the benefit of the doubt because he was never politically close to the saffron brigade.

But Vice Chairman V S Rajashekharan Pillai and secretary, Ved Prakash had aligned themselves with Joshi during the six years of NDA rule.

Like Nigevekar, Dikshit of IGNOU has played a very apolitical role over the past several years and soon after taking over Singh made it clear that if someone was staying from the Joshi era it was going to be Dikshit. After all, Dikshit was made a Pro Vice Chancellor of IGNOU during Singh’s time. And at the open university Dikshit was able to maintain his neutral image.

Madhu Panth of the National Institute of Open Schooling has also been allowed to stay on.

In fact, a couple of months ago, a decision had been almost taken about his exit but then technical bottlenecks cropped up.

But Singh had ignored technical difficulties when it came to removing Joshi’s handpicked director for National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, P K Joshi. Even though Joshi had come on a five-year tenure from Jabalpur, Singh took enough legal precautions to ensure his exit.

There are some in the ministry who say that UGC officials will not escape the axe for long. They pointed out that Tripathi’s continuance as ICHR chairman was on the cards because the ancient history scholar had come quite close to Prof Irfan Habib in recent months.

Sources say that Tripathi has taken the help of a former HRD Secretary to build his bridges with the new dispensation.

In the new council that was announced today several Left leaning historians expectedly clinched berths.

The council now includes Y Subbarayalu, K N Panikkar, Shireen Moosvi, J P Mishra, Suraj Bhan, Rajat K Ray, Imtiaz Ahmed, Barun De, Tamo Mibang (NEHU), David Reid Syiemlieh (Arunachal Pradesh), K Paddayya, Maryam Dossal, Ashraf Wani, Indu Bange, Shahid Amin, D N Jha, Basudev Chatterjee and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya.