By Siddhant Mohan, TwoCircles.net
Varanasi: Never expect a dull moment in Banaras Hindu University. The university, which has over the past few years been almost always in the news (and mostly for the wrong reasons) stumped the students of MA in Political Science with a series of rather weird questions.
The question paper on the subject “Indian Political System: Theoretical and Structural Aspects” starts with asking the students to answer “What do you understand by secularism?” in 50 words. While there is nothing controversial in this question, the same cannot be said of other questions.
The same paper – with the subject code MP 104 – asks the question “Write an essay on Bharatiya Janata Party.” Making the particular section even more interesting for the students, an alternative question is given, “In two era of Coalition Government in India, discuss the nature of Federalism.”
The strangeness of question paper continues in the next question paper of the subject “Social and Political Thought of Ancient and Medieval India”, the subject of which is MP 105.
This particular question paper asks about the ‘Saptang Theory’ of Manu and then goes on to ask the students to “Write an essay on Nature of GST in Kautilya Arthshastra”.
And as an alternative to the same question “Manu is the first Indian Thinker of Globalization. Discuss” is put forth the students to answer.
The students of the department have alleged that these topics – over which the questions are based – are not listed in the syllabus, and for many students, the question became unanswerable.
One student told TwoCircles.net, “Professor KK Mishra specifically made us wrote down the answers on this particular topic during our classes. He even told us that he would put these topics in the question paper also.”
Prof Kaushal Kishor Mishra, who has been in the limelight since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, has always been a mysterious person on the campus. Soon after Modi adopted Jayapur for the model village scheme, Mishra appointed one of his research scholars for a research project on Jayapur village.
While talking to TwoCircles.net, Mishra, a professor at the social sciences faculty at BHU and a member of the RSS, told the media, “I suppose there is nothing wrong in asking students to write an essay on BJP. We have been asking them to write essays on Congress or left parties, why there is so much problem when we ask them to write on BJP?”
Contrary to Mishra’s claims, students and previous years’ papers show that BHU used to ask about “socialism culture in Congress” and similar sort of focused questions, but as one student said, “Now we have to write an essay on BJP without a definite focus on the topic.”
Mishra denied the claims that he had told the students that he might ask the students about the BJP essay, Kautilya and GST or Manu as a global leader. He said, “India is a country of fools. Fools here know nothing about the Kautilya and his taxation system. These liberal and leftists have corrupted the academics, and they do not know that one nation-one tax theory was proposed by Kautilya for the very first time.”
Mishra has his PhD on “Manusmriti mein Rajtantra” and strongly believes in the ideology of Manu. He said, “Manu, along with Kautilya, is the person who has shaped the modern India. But everyone failed to recognize him as the person behind their foreign agendas,” he added.