'Did public vote Modi for his degrees?' Ajit Pawar's surprising statement

In a surprising statement, senior NCP leader and former Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar has raised an interesting question which would pour cold water on all the hot debates the Opposition has been trying hard to create, though unsuccessfully.

In his statement, Pawar wondered "if people voted Prime Minister Modi in 2014 on the basis of his degree." In a sort of extending his support to PM Modi, he said that Modi was voted to power in 2014 "on the basis of his charisma", and not his degree.

It comes at a time when the AAP has raised questions on the genuineness of PM Modi's educational degrees and claimed that they would turn out to be "fake" if a probe is conducted. Pawar has, however, said that it is not right to question the degrees of ministers and that people should focus on what a leader has achieved in their tenure, according to a report in ANI.

Addressing a public meeting on Sunday, Ajit Pawar said, "In the year 2014, did the public vote for Prime Minister Modi on the basis of his degree? It was the charisma he had created which helped him win the elections."

"Now he has been representing the country for nine years. It is not fair to ask about his degree. We should question him on issues like inflation and unemployment. Minister's degree is not an important issue," he added. He further asked, "Will inflation reduce if we get clarity on his degree? Will people get jobs after knowing the status of his degree?"

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had earlier said that Prime Minister Modi should put his college degrees in the public domain. AAP had raised the issue in 2016 also and then BJP chief Amit Shah and the then finance minister Arun Jaitley had displayed Modi's degrees during a press conference to debunk its allegations and demanded an apology from Kejriwal for trying to defame PM Modi.

AAP MP and national spokesperson Sanjay Singh asked the Prime Minister to "reveal" the truth before the nation. He said if his degrees turn out to be fake, he would lose his Lok Sabha membership and also become ineligible to contest elections for submitting wrong information to the Election Commission.

"Entire BJP is rattled since the issue of the Prime Minister's degree came to the fore. All the ministers and spokesperson of the BJP have scrambled to prove that the Prime Minister's degree is not fake," the AAP leader told a press conference in New Delhi on Sunday.

Last Friday, Gujarat High Court quashed a seven-year-old order of the Central Information Commission (CIC) that had asked the Delhi University and Gujarat University to provide information on PM's degree to Kejriwal. The court also imposed a fine of Rs 25,000 on the AAP chief for filing such a frivolous petition.

With inputs from agencies