Despite Gujarat High Court ruling, Kejriwal continues to target PM Modi’s education with misleading claims

The Gujarat High Court made a significant ruling on March 31, 2023, that overturned a 2016 order by the Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) regarding Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s academic credentials. The CIC had directed the Gujarat University and Delhi University to disclose Modi’s graduation and post-graduation degrees to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal under the Right to Information Act (RTI Act). However, Justice Vaihnav quashed the order and criticized Kejriwal for misusing the RTI Act, which empowers citizens to access public information, for political purposes. Besides, Justice Vaihnav even imposed a fine of ₹25000 on Kejriwal, highlighting the importance of using the RTI Act responsibly and not as a tool to settle political scores.

However, on April 1, 2023, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal made a controversial claim in a press conference and on social media. He alleged that the Gujarat High Court had ruled that the people of India could not get any information about the educational qualifications of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, causing shockwaves across the country. Apart from this, Kejriwal also said that he had seen a video in which Modi himself admitted that he was not much educated and had only gone to a school in a village.

Furthermore, adding fuel to the controversy, left-wing propagandist journalist Abhisar Sharma also shared a video clip of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his YouTube video, at 4 minutes 47 second time frame Narendra Modi purportedly admitted that he had only studied till high school. This clip supports Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s claim that the issue of Modi’s academic qualifications is irrelevant since Modi himself has acknowledged that he is not highly educated.

But are Arvind Kejriwal’s and Abhisar’s claims true? Did the Gujarat High Court really say that the public cannot access Modi’s educational records? And did Modi really make such a statement about his own education? In this Fact check article, we will examine the evidence and provide a verdict.

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Fact Check

During our fact-checking, we aimed to verify a claim made by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal that the Gujarat High Court had stated that the people of India could not obtain information about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s educational qualifications. However, our investigation revealed that the claim was baseless and misleading. The High Court’s order did not mention any such restriction and, in fact, confirmed that Modi’s degree certificate was already available on the Gujarat University’s website. Instead, the court criticized Kejriwal’s RTI application for lacking valid grounds of public interest and being politically motivated.

Next, we tried to verify the authenticity and context of a video clip shared by Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal and left-wing propagandist journalist Abhisar Sharma. Since the clip shared by Abhisar has Narendra Modi and Rajeev Shukla in it, we conducted a keyword search on YouTube for “Narendra Modi Interview with Rajeev Shukla.” So, after scanning through several videos, we found the interview video in which at 20 minutes 35 seconds time frame of the video, Rajeev Shukla asked Narendra Modi about his educational qualifications. In the video, Modi acknowledged that he had studied only up to high school but had later completed his B.A and M.A. degrees by giving external exams, as per the request of an RSS official. Thus, this information contradicts the claim made by Kejriwal that Modi had himself admitted to being “not much educated” and implies that Modi had pursued higher education through unconventional means.

In conclusion, our fact-check analysis reveals that Arvind Kejriwal’s claim that the Gujarat High Court has denied the people of India the right to obtain information about PM Modi’s educational qualifications is false and misleading.

Moreover, our search for the video clip shared by Kejriwal and Abhisar Sharma confirms that Modi did not admit to being “not much educated” but rather acknowledged pursuing higher education through external exams.

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