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An interesting fact that has come up after the Milli Gazette’s inquiry is that Bhat gave perhaps the maximum numbers of computer centres to the state of Jammu & Kashmir which is the only state in India where Urdu is the state language and therefore is not in need of any affirmative action from New Delhi. So what made Bhat think that Urdu needs to be promoted in J&K the most? The only explanation to his generosity is that he himself came from this state and still has most of his family members living there. A detailed enquiry would also reveal the lack of any policy whatsoever towards the allocation of computer centres which the director followed as only his sole discriminatory powers. The hindview here reveals a saga of corruption (money extracted from supplying agencies), malpractices and irregularities (by allotting maximum centres in his own state to his kin and friends) in this most celebrated scheme of
NCPUL. Ironically Bhat’s claim to fame as a benefactor of Urdu is this very scheme from which he extracted the most. The CBI needs to relook seriously into the working of the computer agencies namely IEC and CCT etc. that are supplying and running the computer centres on behalf of the
NCPUL. A close scrutiny of the agencies would reveal the story of the corruption by the director without much effort.
It is true that computer centres were mainly given to Muslim organisations for the obvious reason that the BJP neither had its own Muslim voluntary organisations nor it was interested in any Muslim cause, as both th BJP politics and the RSS had been surviving because of their anti-Muslims stance. So the RSS & Co. can be absolved from the charge of taking political mileage out of this scheme but nonetheless, through the structuring of question papers Bhat ensured that the course be accessible to all and not only to Urdu
literates.
The Milli Gazette started investigating as to what the substantive material as evidence or as text of the material was with the CBI and after a lot of investigation it was revealed that actually the CBI had started the investigation as part of its strategy to keep an eye on Bhat only after the article appeared in the Milli Gazette. The author of the article Dr. Ather Farouqui told the Milli Gazette that he had sent his article to Chief Vigilance Commissioner also with a request to investigate the matter. Farouqui says that he has no other substantive material except the file that was the basis of his article. Farouqui also felt that the contents of the article could provide sufficient grounds to examine the whole functioning of the NCPUL during the last seven years since Bhat joined the
organisation. CVC too has informed Dr. Farouqui that it was referring the case to the Vigilance Department of the ministry of
HRD. But since the ministry of HRD was unmoved, one could assume that the case was hushed up.
Realities surfaced only after the 30 September raids. In fact, the CBI was keeping an eye on Bhat for ‘sometime’, that is since the Milli Gazette article was referred to the ministry of HRD by the
CVC. It is almost the same period when Arjun Singh’s close bureaucrat and earlier incharge of the NCPUL in the capacity of Additional Secretary, Sudeep Bannerjee was alleviated as the Secretary, ministry of
HRD. According to insiders, Bhat was persona non grata for Sudeep Bannerjee and the lalter did not keep his extreme dislike for Bhat a secret. After Bannerjee’s appointment, no one in the ministry was willing to interact with
Bhat. Bannerjee is known for his Left leanings and unlike other Left-wingers; his honesty played a decisive role in hammering the last nail in the coffin.
Bhat by now had assumed that he had become the life-time director of NCPUL and was immune to any change of guard in the country’s politics. To add to his confidence, Bhat had the support of many Muslim politicians in the Congress, but they all were those whom Arjun Singh did not like. Singh in fact, had been trying hard to project himself as a friend of minorities. After the UPA came to power, all Congressmen doing Muslim politics, some of them from the opposite camp of Arjun Singh in the Congress, had been supporting
Bhat. Under these circumstances, the fresh developments provided an opportunity to the minister to get rid of Bhat on very valid corruption charges. On the other hand, he was also able to please Left parties which had been pressurising him to remove Bhat from his eternal post. Peoples Democracy, the weekly organ of the CPI (M), published an article acknowledging the Milli Gazette’s story. Because of the tag of "most corrupt officer", the minister of HRD did not face any apparent opposition from the so-called supporters of Bhat in the Congress. Analysts of Muslim politics also suggest that reference of Kashmir is also an important aspect in the whole
sotry, which made the matter more sensitive. According to the story which appeared in the Indian Express, it was clear that Bhat had allotted many centres to his friends and relatives in
Kashmir.
Urdu community unnecessarily got a bad name through NCPUL because of the passive and opportunistic attitude of Urdu intellectuals who allowed the situation to deteriorate to the worst extent to safeguard their petty interests. The pathetic state of affairs could be brought out in the open if this paper carries a story on how Urdu intellectuals got sold out to Bhat’s petty favours in order to turn a blind eye to his saffron agenda. Favours such as printing of their book with a grant from the Council, which was the work of the Council otherwise too, or sanctioning a 2-3 days seminar and making some favoured Reader or Professor its
Co-coordinator for handling budget besides other cheap favours which do not come to more than couple of thousand rupees...
With the arrest and suspension of Bhat, the historically cruel city of Delhi is no more interested in a dead horse. However, it is the time when all well-wishers of Urdu — of course outside the world of Urdu vultures — should sit together to introspect and to analyse where things have gone wrong and how to save this secular institution associated with a dying language.
Below is a summary which can be used to rewrite the annulled memorandum of the association of the
NCPUL. After the Milli Gazette article, the government constituted a committee to look into the issue of the project of linguistics. But, surprisingly, most of the members of the committee happen to be very dear friends of the previous director. The obvious result was that there was no forward movement in the issue till date. Obviously, the Committee did not do anything. The ministry of HRD constituted another committee which included the leftist DR Goyal who until recently had remained passive. This committee too is sitting idle. Perhaps the leftists are busy in their great ideological debates as usual and have no time for the earthly issues relating to Urdu and minorities. One can therefore understand their lack of interest and even disdain in matters related to the
NCPUL. Once again the responsibility comes to the shoulders of the Urdu community at large to take care of the facts relating to the
NCPUL, more importantly in the changed scenario.
The innocent Muslim intellectuals whose names will prominently figure in history as beneficiaries of Bhat did not know how ruthless the process of history is — there is no metaphor which was not used by Muslim beneficiaries of the council for Murli Manohar Joshi and the BJP during the last general elections. History has recorded all the events with documentary proofs including the one where Joshi was called the ‘visionary’ education minister after Maulana Abul Kalam
Azad. It is a pity that all the qaseedas of Joshi chorused by the beneficiaries meticulously recorded by the funding master Bhat in NCPUL’s journal Urdu
Duniya, so historians do not need to go into much research. Fortunately the process of history started incredibly soon.
Now there is an urgent need to constitute a CBI enquiry into the affairs of the
NCPUL, especially its day-to-day functioning. Its Memorandum of Association should be rewritten after a national debate and asking the Urdu-speaking people to give their suggestions, as was done in the case of Curriculum Frame-Work. The participation of the ministries of finance and education would make things more clear and fruitful.
There are some points that need to be taken care of by the ministry of human resource development. The council should be reconstituted. Earlier most of the members were loyalists of
Bhat, who tried to twist and manipulate the corrective steps taken by the ministry of human resource development. About 80 per cent of the budget allocation of the NCPUL is being spent for two heads (including salaries): Printing and Computer Scheme. Both these are the main heads of corruption. It is alleged that most of the printing work was allotted to one single person
(JK Offset Press) in the Jama Masjid area of Old Delhi. This same man owns three printing presses with three different names. This man’s presses were allotted the bulk work continuously for seven years. But even this was an eyewash. The bill for the printing comes to around
Rs. 50 lakh per annum as per council’s own tender notice published in 2004. One can understand the simple logic of corruption. A thorough enquiry will reveal the chronology of corruption as the council invited tenders asking
Rs. 1,00,000 bank guarantee from interested parties but the allocation of printing job among approved printers is so uneven that it would already tell the story of the rampant corruption.
Virtually no norms were followed to allot computer centres to voluntary organisations or to computer agencies for the supply and maintenance of the hardware given to these computer
centres. The business either was done by the director himself or by some of his henchmen. Voluntary organisations have all kind of complaints against the agencies that have been managing the maintenance after establishment of the
centres. The common complaint is that the agencies are providing very low quality apparatus namely computer sets, and pirated
softwares. It may be mentioned that pirated versions of software can be procured at a very low price in the black market.
Computer centres have nothing to do with Urdu promotion. Calling them "Urdu Computer
Centres" is a big fraud. These centres also teach Urdu software fraudulently as most of the students do not know Urdu script. Adding insult to injury, the NCPUL suggested a few books — some of them written by the council members — to teach Urdu. In exams the paper of Urdu is of minimum marks and set in a way that nobody would fail. For good measure, students are allowed to write their answers in devanagri script!
At the time of its inception, the NCPUL was expected to be the advisory body for policies dealing only with central government schemes. To call it an apex organisation was the greatest administrative fraud but no body including government of India checked the fact as to how an organisation under the central government can be a nodal agency and apex body dealing with all schemes related to Urdu, Muslim education and madrasa system along with madrasa
modernisation. It is evident that neither the Muslim minority’s education, nor the modernisation of madrasa
programme, was and is, officially included (as technically it cannot be) under the jurisdiction of
NCPUL. Urdu as the language of culture and education, and Muslims’ education are not synonymous even for administrative purposes. Education up to senior secondary level is a state subject and a different area of educational administration, even for policy planning at the level of central government.
NCPUL was wrongly, rather fraudulently, dealing with Persian and Arabic languages at the level of ministry of human resource development. This is altogether a different area of academic activity but with the blessings of the RSS the council was dealing at the implementation level of government policies and distributing funds. Apart from the corruption, God alone knows what game the mentor of
Bhat, the former human resource development minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, was up to...
NCPUL was desperately keen on saffronising madrasas, and as part of the game it was also working to rewrite the literary history of J&K, on RSS guidelines. No body is aware about the real motives of the RSS in launching the project through
NCPUL. So in the typical fashion of the RSS, no details were made available except the news items about the rewriting of J&K’s history project that was undertaken by the
NCPUL. All that the country was told was that the ministry of human resource development had sanctioned
Rs. 1,000,000 for the five-volume project for reconstructing Kashmir’s literary and cultural history and its Sanskrit past. Apart from RSS phraseology, the money was to be given from the allocated budget for the promotion of Urdu language.
The RSS, through the NCPUL, was trying to send distorted messages to the nation that the madrasa network was so vast and dangerous that it could ignite a civil war in the country. United News of India put out a news item in which it was quoted that the government had “authentic information” about the
madrasas. It was asserted time and again that as per the data available with the government of India half a million (!) madrasas are functioning in India and about 50 (fifty) million (!) students are enrolled in them.. Part-time and evening madrasas are not included in this list! The NCPUL had been repeatedly projecting the data through various platforms, without quoting the source. For instance, the editorial of Urdu Duniya entitled ‘Hamari
Baat’ on page 7 of the July 2003 issue projected this data with articulated arguments of the RSS in the same fashion that is known as style of the
RSS. The RSS views on madrasas tend to tarnish the Muslim community with imagined characteristics which madrasas are said to possess.
This data is being used by scholars world over as authentic while it is absolutely fake. Though the NCPUL had been projecting the data till the BJP was in power, but after the Congress came to power, when Syed Shahabuddin raised the issue, the NCPUL published an apology in Urdu in Urdu
Duniya, its in-house journal, in a very vague phraseology for projecting and publishing the fake data.
The ministry of human resource development and the UPA government should issue the corrigendum pertaining to the figures regarding madrasas with a clarification that the NCPUL was not the apex body and the data projected repeatedly through it was fake. World over there is no example of this kind of fraud, where an Urdu organisation first claimed itself as apex body of the government of India and then projected fraudulent figures that could have had international repercussions, particularly after 9/11, after which the entire non-Muslim world is after
madrasas.
This data was first presented in the inaugural session of the seminar organised by the NCPUL and later on in the detailed report of the seminar. The data was projected by Dr. Halim Khan, the then chairman of the Madrasa Board, MP and a member of the Society for Human Empowerment, a registered society which was used to convert black money into white by the NCPUL director. Indeed, tremendous courage is needed to open and run an NGO from the offices of the
NCPUL.
The RSS was attempting to tarnish the madrasa system by hijacking the madrasas in the name of modernisation of religious educational institutions by linking the process of the Hinduisation of the Hindus with the minoritisation of the institutions of the minorities. The report of the said seminar that was organised by the NCPUL also stated that the central government spent
Rs. 20 million in 2001-2002 for carrying out its modernisation scheme.
Madrasa modernisation scheme has remained a far cry for a long time simply because the government is neither serious to handle the issue of improvement in the material condition of Muslims, nor knows the ethos of madrasas which are voluntarily run by the Muslim community. Muslim educational empowerment is possible through schooling and it has nothing to do with madrasas but the increase of the education budget in which all successive governments have failed miserably. The BJP government had carried forward its own plans for funding of the huge network of the
Pathshalas, Shishu Mandirs and other schools run by the RSS organisations. The game plan was to give them money by setting a precedent of giving money to
madrasas. And obviously NCPUL volunteered itself for the service. The BJP was not at all intending to increase the budget for education to implement the Sarv Siksha
Abhiyan, so it failed to provide compulsory education under the 86th amendment of the Constitution. As a result Muslims remained deprived of any educational empowerment.
Government of India should also issue a statement that it would not continue any of the policies of the NCPUL unless a proper policy is formed.
The NCPUL employed three-pronged strategies to purchase Urdu-wallahs: purchase of books through bulk purchase
programme, publication of articles in Urdu Duniya, the monthly journal of the
NCPUL, and giving money to one madrasa as a show window, claiming that the BJP has successfully purchased all the Muslims who are desperate for modernising
madrasas, in other words to commit suicide. Of course it was not the case. Unfortunately, due to the huge favours of the NCPUL to its beneficiaries there was no move among Urdu writers against
saffronistion, while the whole exercise was targeted at Muslims and Urdu from every angle.
Now it is up to the UPA government, which came to power promising detoxification of all educational and literary institutions from saffron venom, to give it a serious thought and develop a secular and healthy constitution (its mandate, nature, and scope) for this sole body for Urdu in HRD ministry and put in place required checks and balances to regain its lost esteem that has suffered a beating in the wake of its chief executive becoming a top corrupt officer in the last nationwide anti-corruption drive of CBI.
There is a buzz that after getting the bail following 14 days judicial custody, Bhat has a cheek to try to get reinstated in the same organization, which he milked for seven long years. In no circumstances he should be allowed to return to the NCPUL even if he is able to get reinstated getting advantage of employing incompetent processes by relevant agencies at some stage which is not approved by the law. In any case, there should be a fixed term and specified qualifications for the post of director of the NCPUL in future. In central government, there is no provision, outside the academic canon, for any gazetted officer to stay in an organization for more than three years. Even secretaries cannot stay for more than the stipulated period of three years without an extension, which is not easy, and no officer can get frequent extensions. Like all his frauds, Bhat had fraudulently managed to prolong his stay at the NCPUL for almost seven years continuously. Even his appointment as an assistant registrar at Kashmir University was a political job as he was not appointed by the
UPSC. Later he had to resign as registrar of the Jamia Hamdard after serious corruption charges were levelled against him and he was given the option of resignation or sack. Sources in the ministry of HRD confirm that his services from Kashmir University were transferred to the ministry of HRD during the BJP rule with a lot of inaccuracies as far as service rules are concerned. So the CBI can also look into this matter, which too is a fit case to investigate.
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