Sanjay Kumar’s Forced Appointment as CSDS Faculty & Illegitimate Elevation as Director
Shri Dharmendra Pradhan ji,
As someone who witnessed from close the political shenanigans and varied scams at CSDS for more than two decades, I am glad that the Education Ministry has finally decided to take note of the sinister agendas being promoted at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. I was a faculty member at CSDS from 1991 to 2016 with a break of couple years in between. Like many others, I left CSDS as a thoroughly disenchanted person.
Sadly, some of the bigger scamsters have retired in glory. Simultaneously, many of the powerful foreign funding agencies have also withdrawn support to CSDS. Therefore, only the remaining chillar among the faculty will face the consequences, in case the Education Ministry decides to call CSDS to account. However, during these years, Sanjay Kumar grew from a petty foot soldier to becoming one of the biggest frauds at CSDS. Therefore, it is good that finally he is being called to account for his many dushkarmas. Please don’t stop at the latest scam of Lokniti which has attracted national attention. This is a mere tip of the iceberg.
I am the only one who challenged the lawless regime at CSDS during its heydays –even while being employed there. Not surprisingly, I paid a heavy price for my unwillingness to ignore their power games and frauds. I even took the risk of submitting a 35-page long petition to the former Minister for Education, Shri Prakash Javadekar as well as to the Chairperson ICSSR listing in detail the lawless manner in which successive Ruling Coteries at CSDS ran the institution while reducing the ICSSR as well as the Governing Board to mere rubber stamps. I had pleaded that all ICSSR funded institutions, starting with the CSDS must be subjected to a thorough academic and financial audit. Sadly, no real action followed my petition.
I will be providing you strong evidence of the lawless regime at CSDS through a series of Open Letters in order to strengthen your probe against the scam ridden institution. I hope my inputs will be of use to you.
Of all the ICSSR funded institutions, CSDS has been both scam-ridden as well as supremely arrogant underneath its mask of piety. For instance, despite being a public funded institution, it has never implemented even basic rules for its administration or for recruiting new faculty members. Even promotions to senior positions, including to the Director’s post are done in the most underhand manner. For a whole decade I challenged this in faculty meetings. When Prof T N Madan was chairman of the Governing Board, he too pushed for adoption of basic rules regarding rights and duties of the faculty. But nothing came of it except the nautanki of appointing committee after committee to draft Rules and Regulations.
Most of the ICSSR funded institutions are expected to raise 50 percent of their required funds from the respective state governments. But CSDS is the only one that gets 90 percent of its yearly budget from the ICSSR, which also pitches in handsome amounts of additional grants for specific projects. And yet, ICSSR has never dared to conduct an audit of its performance, leave alone take stock of the agenda-driven research and advocacy campaigns it promotes.
Since CSDS had solid backing of powerful foreign funding institutions, such as Ford Foundation, IDRC (Canada), Gates Foundation, USAID, DFID (UK), NORAD (Norway), Hewlett Foundation, various European Foundations among others, nobody has dared question its academic credentials and the dubious agendas for which huge grants came its way. Its intimate linkages with Break Up India forces in cohorts with western academia have provided it enormous clout and political immunity.
Sanjay Kumar’s Irregular Appointment to CSDS Faculty: Nothing better illustrates the irregularities and nepotism in appointments at CSDS than the case of Sanjay Kumar himself, who has been caught for his brazen distortion of electoral data to serve devious political agendas. Sanjay was hired in mid-1990’s on a contract basis as a research assistant by Yogendra Yadav (popularly referred to as YoYa on SM platforms) for the election studies programme of Lokniti. Dr V.B. Singh headed the Data Unit of Lokniti at that time. V B Singh had also been hired as a young data cruncher in 19670s by Rajni Kothari for his election studies program at a position similar to that of Sanjay Kumar. Therefore, apart from YoYa, V. B. Singh took Sanjay Kumar under his wing and became his fierce promoter. Thus, his first training in manipulating survey data took place under an unabashed pious fraud—Yogendra Yadav and his comrade-in-arms, V B Singh, who also rose quickly in the CSDS hierarchy through a route similar to that of Sanjay Kumar. For several years, Sanjay’s contract with Lokniti was renewed every six months because he was not part of regular administrative or academic staff of CSDS. He came with a mediocre MA degree in political science and had no prior research experience.
His role at Lokniti was so peripheral that at one time Yogendra loaned him to me as a research assistant at a meagre remuneration of Rs 500 per month for helping me with some data collection for my weekly program on Doordarshan. Once I left that series he went back to Yadav at a very modest remuneration.
As the Lokniti work expanded and got more and more hefty grants from western donor agencies, Yadav recruited several others to be part of the Lokniti Programme. But those who came with good academic credentials didn’t stay for long. However, since Sanjay was willing to be treated as an obedient foot soldier, blindly following the dictates and political agendas of Yadav in the survey work, he became a valuable asset for YoYa. Yadav felt Sanjay alone could be trusted with being his second-in-command at Lokniti since VB Singh saw himself as Yadav’s senior in the game. That is why in 2004, Yadav and V B Singh pushed hard the name of Sanjay to be recruited as an Associate Fellow at the CSDS.
As per the then Director, Dr R K Srivastava, both he and the Board of Governors had reservations against giving Sanjay a faculty position because he didn’t have the required qualifications. The then Chairman of the CSDS Governing Board, Prof T N Madan, was a stickler for procedures, rules and regulations. Initially, he resisted endorsing Sanjay’s recruitment saying that there was nothing in his record to merit recruitment as a faculty member. Prof Madan argued that if Sanjay is very good in data crunching and its “management”, he should be offered an appropriate technical post in Lokniti’s data unit, rather than a faculty position.
But since Yadav had been instrumental in getting the Rs 5 crore corpus fund from the Ford Foundation plus other hefty grants from foreign donor agencies, he had for a period acquired enormous clout as the uncrowned king of CSDS. Moreover, as a protege of Prof Sheth Yadav and V.B. Singh together succeeded in bulldozing Sanjay Kumar’s appointment to the faculty, without due process.
At that time Sanjay’s inclusion became the butt of fairly loud criticism at CSDS whereby he used to be derisively referred to as Yadav’s “flunkey” and “coolie”.
But the matter didn’t stop there. Over the years as Yadav got more and more busy with television assignments and being part of dozens of UPA government Committees, as well as lecture tours abroad, he passed on the responsibility of all his survey work on to Sanjay. By way of reward, he and V.B Singh pushed for rapid promotions for Sanjay to enhance the strength of their lobby as against the growing clout of the SARAI team headed by Ravi Vasudevan. Within nine years of joining as an Associate Fellow, thanks to Yadav’s and V.B Singh’s patronage, Sanjay was made full professor in 2011. Just as his initial appointment was without due process selection, so also his rapid promotions came without proper academic evaluation by an independent Selection Committee, as required by the protocol laid down by the ICSSR .
Bizarre Reasons for Making Sanjay Director of CSDS against all Norms & Precedents:
Sanjay Kumar was least likely to be made Director in 2013 because he was the junior most among professors and was treated with healthy contempt by the post-Yadav Leftist Ruling Coterie of CSDS which ran another foreign funded project named SARAI. Since Yadav had been at loggerheads with the SARAI team at CSDS, Sanjay Kumar, as his foot soldier, was also treated with disdain by the SARAI team.
In sharp contrast to Sanjay Kumar’s rapid advancement due to the patronage of the Ruling Coterie of 1990’s, I had been a target of systematic discrimination at the Centre from 1991 itself. (I will provide an account of the series of outrageous acts against me in Part 3 of this series). But I did not fight back since I was really repulsed by the ongoing power games at CSDS and did not want to be part of any of the three tussling groups:
- The original seniors referred to as “Uncles” ,,
- Yogendra Yadav’s Lokniti team backed by Dr V.B Singh and Prof Dhirubhai Sheth,
- The ultra-left SARAI team which soon cut Yadav to size and invented new ways to exercise arbitrary power without any checks and balances—so much so that even the Director was reduced to the status of a rubber stamp.
Instead of becoming part of power struggles, I focused on my own work and avoided aligning myself with the three main tussling groups. Fortunately for me, I was not dependent on CSDS for bestowing academic credentials because MANUSHI, the journal and organization I founded, were globally celebrated for their pioneering content and provided me a far more honourable platform to express myself.
I Was Bypassed Four Times as Director to the Benefit of Sanjay Kumar: Till it was my turn to become Director, almost every single person who became a full professor and stayed on at CSDS till his/her retirement, became the Director of CSDS by rotation as per seniority. There was only one exception to this rule – that of Prof Gopal Krishna whose claim was by-passed by Prof D L Sheth. Gopal Krishna was not only senior to Dhirubhai Sheth but more importantly, he was a co-founder of CSDS along with Rajni Kothari and had played a big role in garnering financial and political support for the institution in its difficult founding years. In utter disgust at being sidelined in this crude manner, Gopal Krishna left for Oxford on a very long leave where he had a chair as a Visiting Professor from earlier times. Thereafter, he would come to CSDS for brief periods every year or two where he still retained faculty room. He maintained a low key profile at the Centre, indicating that he never reconciled to his marginalization.
But after I became eligible for the director’s post, the seniority principle was discarded even more unceremoniously—that too FOUR times–and very bizarre games were played to sideline me for that post. All these games led to the unexpected elevation of Sanjay Kumar as Director.
Even though, I never tussled for power at CSDS and allowed them to marginalize me, the Coterie still felt very insecure vis a vis me because I called a spade a spade and did not hesitate to take them on singlehandedly. Consequently, I am the ONLY example of a senior most professor who retired without becoming Director despite putting in more than 20 years of service at CSDS. Prof Gopal Krishna was sidelined long before his retirement age. Also, unlike in my case where. Far more junior persons were chosen to sideline me, not once but thrice, the seniority gap between Prof Sheth and Prof Krishna was marginal.
All three factions were determined to keep me at the periphery and prevent me from becoming the Director because I could not be trusted to overlook, leave alone support the scam ridden ways in which successive Ruling Coteries at CSDS ran the institution. By contrast, they happily ignored each other’s scams.(More on this in a later part of this series).
I became a full professor at CSDS in 2001. But bypassing seniority and without taking me into confidence, Prof Rajiv Bhargava who joined the Centre in 2004 was made director in 2007. The decision was taken by the then Ruling Coterie of “Uncles” and presented to the Board for ratification. I didn’t raise any objections because I was not particularly keen to preside over a corrupt and faction ridden institution. I had seen from close quarters evidence of financial frauds, including the mismanagement of the PF Fund. When Suresh Sharma was director, he confided in me on more than one occasion that whitewashing the past scams in the management of funds was a nightmarish experience for him since he was never part of the Ruling Coterie. In fact, before becoming director he had a very peripheral presence at CSDS. He was made Director only because after the “Uncles” retired they needed someone who would be loyal enough to cover up their mismanagement.
Rajiv Bhargava as director brought the JNU glamour with him. But he was abroad so frequently and for such long periods during his seven year-long directorial tenure that he was sarcastically referred to as a “Visiting Director”. On one occasion he was away for ten months at a stretch leaving the Centre under the charge of officiating directors, who were not given real power to take decisions independently in his absence. His frequent and long absences caused lot more infighting and conflicts over a host of issues.
When Rajeev Bhargava decided to step down as director in the year 2013, I was bypassed in favour of far more junior faculty members, that too in a farcical manner. In a meeting of the then Faculty Standing Committee held on 5th December, 2013, the name of Shail Mayaram (wife of UPA finance minister Chidambaram’s favourite bureaucrat, Arvind Mayaram) was proposed for the post though she was junior to me by several years. However, her appointment was blocked by the HRD ministry since she has OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) status and holds a US passport. Such persons can only become visiting fellows in public funded institutions, not permanent faculty. In that sense even her original appointment may well be against the law because prior permission of the government was not sought in giving her a full professorship at CSDS.
After Mayaram got ruled out, Ravi Vasudevan who was also junior to me, was asked to take over as director. Despite much persuasion, Vasudevan declined on the grounds that he was going to be out of India for long periods on account of his teaching assignments abroad. After that, the name of Aditya Nigam (once a card holding member of CPM and very sympathetic to the Maoists) was proposed by the Ruling Coterie.
Nigam became a professor as late as 2011 and was therefore junior to me by over nine years. Even though I had suffered brazen forms of discrimination on several counts before this occasion, but this outrageous attempt to bypass me in favour of someone as unpleasant and undeserving a person as Nigam was too much to stomach. I found the nomination of Aditya Nigam particularly galling because he, as one of the kingpins of the Ultra Left Ruling Coterie, had subjected many of us, including some former directors, to harassment, habitual bouts of aggression and nasty behaviour. He is extremely uncivil in his conduct towards those who do not endorse his Stalinist ways and his vacuous radicalism. He and Nivedita Menon, (his live-in partner of those days) had been responsible for the most vicious slander campaign against me on account of my book Modi, Muslims & Media.
His hatred for the Hindu civilization borders on insanity, to the point that a couple of years later he and Nivedita Menon, had actively supported the Tukde Tukde Gang at JNU who made the following slogans globally fashionable: Bharat tere tukde honge Insha Allah, Insha Allah; Bharat ki barbaadi tak jung chalgi, jung chalegi”. Their sympathies for the most virulent anti-India outfits in Kashmir as well as Maoist insurgents were well known. Therefore, I refused to endorse Nigam’s candidature. However, instead of positioning myself as a contender for the director’s post, I insisted that clear-cut norms be laid down for the selection of the director, specifying what role seniority played in the selection process.
To quote from my letter of December 5, 2013 to the above-mentioned Committee:
The proceedings of today’s faculty standing committee leading to the proposing of Aditya Nigam’s name were both intriguing and strange.
I made my objections known to all those present before I walked out of the meeting.
Since such vital decisions are supposed to be made on the basis of seniority, it is high time a special committee with at least one member from the CSDS Governing Board be set up to prepare the seniority list through due process. This is a normal practice in most institutions, especially those that are run with public money.
The seniority list should be then ratified by the Board.
I hope you will initiate this process at the earliest so that we have clarity regarding seniority before deciding on who should take over as the next Director.
The response of Ravi Vasudevan to my protest on behalf of the Ruling Coteries that called itself the Faculty Standing Committee is reproduced verbatim as under since it oozes with arrogance that comes with routine exercise of arbitrary power:
As far as I see it, while it is understood that the Director will be chosen from amongst the senior fellows, there is no convention, let alone a rule, that this position should be allocated strictly on the basis of seniority. Only one person suggested [referring to me] that appointment strictly on the basis of seniority was advisable because it would make the process impersonal and less liable to manipulation. Otherwise, I think the understanding was that, while keeping seniority as a criterion, it was crucial that the director should be nominated on the basis of a consensus in the faculty. This would be arrived at by discussions within the senior collegiate and in the larger faculty; and by informal conversation rather than formal procedure. Formally, it is the Board who appoints the director; informally, but conventionally, this is preceded by the faculty consultations outlined here. To suggest a Board member or the Board should be involved in this process in any way would be to take away from the principle of faculty autonomy and faculty leadership of the Centre”. (Dated 6th December 2013)
This was a clear admission that the Woke Coterie first appointed itself as the Faculty Standing Committee and thereby arrogated to itself the power to decide who is to be the Director of CSDS – all this in the guise of “faculty autonomy” and “faculty leadership”. To the best of my knowledge, in no other public funded or even private sector institution, do faculty members decide who is to head the institution. And yet, the ICSSR remained a mute spectator to being treated as a Sugar Daddy without any authority or right to call this handsomely funded organization to account, even when CSDS indulged in malicious propaganda against Hindu dharma, Indian society and state.
As expected, my demand for a certified seniority list was firmly rebuffed. Imagine a public funded institution refusing steadfastly to set up seniority list! Worse still, refusing to lay down clear cut criteria for the selection of its director or senior faculty members.
Fuzzy Rules to Facilitate Lawless Management: It is bad enough that the “Rules & Regulations Governing the Terms and Conditions of Service of the Employees of CSDS”, approved by the B.O.G. of CSDS in 2011 (hereinafter referred to as “Service Rules”), were deliberately left fuzzy to allow manipulation and arbitrary appointments. But even these fuzzy rules were never really implemented, thus enabling totally lawless management by the Ruling Coterie. ( I present a more detailed account of the Lawless Regime at the CSDS in Part Three of this series.)
For instance, Rule 6 stipulated that the “Director of the Centre shall ordinarily be a senior faculty member appointed by the Board. In the event that no suitable faculty member is available to serve as the Director, the Board shall select a candidate through a duly constituted search committee.” [emphasis mine] However, the Rules deliberately DO NOT specify clearly as to how the merit of the candidate would be judged, who would appoint the “search committee” and what would be the composition of this “search committee”. In any case, the Ruling Coterie in effect acted as the ‘search committee” as well as the deciding authority regarding appointments. The rest was all verbiage.
Likewise, the provision/rules do not specify with any clarity and certainty of what would constitute “extra ordinary” circumstances to justify bypassing the senior most fellow of the Centre from the post of directorship. To keep me out of the Director’s post, every rule, every protocol laid down by the ICSSR was brazenly trampled over, bringing in total fuzziness regarding criteria for selection of the director, thus making the exercise outrageously arbitrary.
The Rules/ provisions are also silent as to what would constitute the “un-suitability” of a particular faculty member for the post of Director. In the absence of the clarity on these crucial aspects in Rule 6, the said provisions were deliberately designed to facilitate arbitrary decisions by the Ruling Coterie, which thought it was its God-given right to decide who is to be the director from among its own, or a convenient rubber stamp. To make matters worse, the Governing Board of the CSDS which has to have representatives of the ICSSR on selection committees, was completely stripped of this power in brazen violation of the Rules and Regulations of the Centre.
This was a clear admission that the Ruling Coterie (led at that time by the Ultra Woke SARAI team) which had appointed itself as the Faculty Standing Committee ultimately decided who was to be the Director of CSDS. This was clearly against the Rules and Regulations of ICSSR which pays for running the CSDS.
I thought I would put them on the backfoot by suggesting that if seniority did not matter, then why not have Sanjay Kumar, the junior most among senior fellows as the Director! I had proposed Sanjay’s name more to expose their hypocrisy, than as a serious candidate. I was under the impression that they would never accept him because this Coterie hated Yogendra Yadav and used to refer to Sanjay as YoYa’s “flunkey” and “coolie”.
The readiness with which the Leftist Coterie accepted the nomination of Sanjay Kumar as director, the junior most professor at the time, left me dumbfounded! All these years, he had been at the receiving end of their disdain and jokes because his appointment in faculty as well as subsequent promotions were considered totally undeserving. Little did I know that they were so desperate to keep me out of the Director’s post that they would have readily accepted even a monkey or a donkey’s name as Director, so long I could be kept out. They were smart enough to realize that once a flunkey, always a flunkey. Yo-Ya had already left CSDS. Therefore, they accepted Sanjay’s name knowing full well that he would as willingly be their “flunkey” as he was Yo Ya’s because that is how he had built his career.
Sanjay was quick to distance himself from Yo-Ya in order to curry favour with the Ultra Woke Ruling Coterie and became hideously servile to their dictates, even when it meant going against all norms and elementary integrity or decency. He began to let them have a decisive say, including veto power, in all areas of decision making under the farce of “democratic functioning”.
Their reluctance to have me as director was understandable. I would have insisted on much greater discipline and accountability starting with the system of marking daily attendance, financial transparency, as well as regular academic audit of each and every faculty member through external experts as well as some reasonable limits on foreign assignments and consultancies. I would certainly not be amenable to becoming a puppet in their hands like Sanjay Kumar.
It is pertinent to mention here that it was not just me who left CSDS feeling bitter and disenchanted. Apart from CSDS co-founder Prof Gopal Krishna, almost all who left CSDS after the Rajni Kothari era–either at retirement or resigned before the retirement age on account of ugly power games- left furious and raging, including those like Dr Ramashray Roy who was among the founding members of CSDS. In fact, the most unhappy and disenchanted was Prof Kothari himself. He not only felt let down at the emergence of warring coteries but also lack of coherence in the academic pursuits of various faculty members. He was also very critical of the new-fangled Programs such as the SARAI. The naked political ambitions and penchant for personal enrichment of of Lokniti’s team leaders saddened him no end.
Prof Kothari was an institution builder par excellence. But those who assumed power after him systematically preyed on and weakened the institution, while the Lokniti and the SARAI team effectively destroyed CSDS by crushing and ousting all those who did not further their partisan agendas.
Today, CSDS is a dying institution. It will not survive a day if the ICSSR were to call it to account. Like the proverbial rats, who are the first to abandon a sinking ship, the remaining faculty members at CSDS will simply run to greener pastures and not even bother to defend the institution.
To be continued…
