Looks like Smriti Irani’s heydays are over Also we will never know her educational qualifications!

Union Ministers Smriti Irani and D V Sadananda Gowda have been dropped from Inter-State Council, official sources said on Wednesday. Irani and Gowda were permanent invitees to the council headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It seems the “bahu”(daughter in law) of Indian television has retired from the limelight.Till the reshuffle Smriti Irani was our Human Resources Development(HRD) minister and is presently the minister for Textiles.

But bad news always comes with good news. The Delhi court has finally given her total relief by dismissing the “curious case of her famous fake degrees,”saying that it was filed only because she was a Central Minister , with the sole purpose of harassing her.

What was her real educational qualification? Perhaps this will remain a mystery for us, now that the Delhi Patiala court (Metropolitan Magistrate Harvinder Singh) dismisssed the complaint.

A freelance journalist had filed a complaint alleging that Smriti Irani had filed different educational qualifications while filing her nominations for the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha polls.

Her educational qualifications were different in each election:

In the nomination papers for the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, Ms. Irani said she had completed B.A. in 1996 from Delhi University (correspondence course) but

In the nomination papers for the Rajya Sabha elections in 2011, she said her highest qualification was B.Com Part-1 only from the School of Open Learning from the same university.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections which the Minister contested from Amethi, she had completed B.Com from the School of Open Learning from Delhi University.

It remains to be seen how the courts judge the ex-law minister, Jitender Singh Tomar, (who was subsequently expelled from AAP) embroiled in similar fake degree row.

Is it not our right to know qualifications of our leaders? Not that it matters much!

-UDAAN