On Rahul Gandhi’s Assets & Education – Guest Post by Anjana Bhartia
Dear All: It is my pleasure to publish this Guest Post by Anjana Bhartia on Rahul Gandhi’s assets and educational qualifications. Anjana has done a fine job of primary research to dig up facts, link them to sources and come to some conclusions that lead to uncomfortable questions. I doubt that we will ever get any answer to them though – such is the nature of “secrecy” and hype surrounding “The Prince”. But these questions need to be asked – especially because they are uncomfortable; and because they raise the prospect of Rahul Gandhi having knowingly or unknowingly submitted information to the Election Commission about his educational qualifications that we know is not true. The post also raises questions about his “declared assets” – and while the numbers may add up mathematically, they are difficult to explain (to say the least). Although I do not expect any reply from RG or his minions, I wonder if anyone in mainstream media will pick up the courage to put these questions on their front pages. Â This is not speculation – nor attempt to defame or slander. The questions and the points they raise – are based on publicly available, verified information – which can be cross-checked fairly easily by anyone with a good access to the internet or official records. Without further ado (emphasis added),
*** “Rahul Gandhi’s Assets and Education” – Guest Post Anjana Bhartia ***
There are many in the Congress party who believe that their leaders are above reproach particularly the Gandhi family. Indians are made to believe that Rahul Gandhi is a highly accomplished individual by way of his educational qualifications. Today we wish to put this to test not by floating rumours or false allegations but simply by attempting to question the sworn statements given by Rahul Gandhi himself in his affidavit filed for his Lok Sabha election. In the 2004 election Rahul Gandhi furnished the following details about his education:
- Senior School Secondary from CBSE 1989
- MPhil in (Development Economics), Trinity College, Cambridge University in 1995
No details of his Graduation were deemed necessary to be declared. Â However in 2009 election the following details were declared:
- Senior Secondary from Central Board of Secondary Education 1989
- Bachelor of Arts from Rollins College, Florida in 1994
- MPhil in (Development Economics), Trinity College, Cambridge University in 1995
Please note the subject of specialisation. It says “Development Economicsâ€. According to the official website of Cambridge University there is no such course as Development Economics. Now, agreed that ten years is a long time. But is it long enough to make a person forget the stream they studied in college? Rahul Gandhi’s subject for MPhil was Development Studies not Development Economics which is something entirely different. Was this an unintentional mistake or deliberately misleading, meant to create a false illusion of academic accomplishment? (Update: Pl see this letter from Cambridge University that mentions his degree in “Development Studies”)
Educational qualifications aside, Rahul Gandhi’s possessions seem to present an even more curious case .According to what is largely believed Rahul has dedicated himself to the welfare of this country and its people therefore his only job is being a responsible MP.  Tabled below is a very modest calculation of his said income (with many generous assumptions to give him the benefit of doubt).
Following are some of the assets declared by him in 2004 in his own sworn affidavit for MP elections:
After 5 years RG has declared the following assets in his 2009 affidavit:
The analysis which shows a massive growth in assets (Rs 1 crore, 43 Lakhs (203%!) in spite of a somewhat modest income/earnings during this period (Rs 25 Lakhs). This raises numerous questions, to say the least.
- What is the source of this very significant increase in wealth?
- Did Rahul Gandhi invest the amount in the intervening years in shares/assets that appreciated very significantly and sold these off before the 2009 election (since they do not appear on this statement)?
- Is this increase in wealth the result of income of inheritance from a Trust Fund that paid out?
- Does this amount include gift(s) by family members or friends or well-wishers)?
Leaders are expected to lead by example. Rahul Gandhi has declared the value of 6 acres of his (undivided) ancestral property in a prime area in Delhi at a meagre Rs 28 Lakhs. A farmhouse with farmland of 4.6 acres is valued at a paltry Rs 9Lakhs and 80Thousand Rupees. Is this really the true value? If it is, I would happily fork over twice of his estimated/declared price for such a prime piece of land (and I am sure there are others who would be happy to get on this “bargain†too!). Is he a fool or does he take us to be fools? And what is the source of these assets? Did he inherit the land? From whom? And when? Of course he can always say he is not bound to declare  the source of these assets but that would not really be setting an example, would it?
If this how Congressmen value their assets no wonder 2G spectrum and coal blocks were sold off at throwaway prices!
*** End ***
About Anjana (in her own words):
I am an Economics Grad who somehow managed to do an MBA inMarketing… Till about a year ago I was living happily in my own cocoon. I like many youngsters believed that politics did not affectmy day to day life. However over the past one year I have started noticing the things around me and come to the realization that it isbecause of bad politics and our poor leaders. I’ve read somewhere that in a democracy people get the government they deserve. I however believe that India deserves better.
Comments, thoughts welcome as always. Pl do share among friends and family. This is the kind of “news” that not many channels and newspaper would cover or report. Thanks Anjana, for this great piece of painstaking and thorough research. Jai Hind, Jai Bharat!
Related: A few inconvenient questions for the “Youth Icon“ and Open Letter to Rahul Gandhi from a “not-so-Aam†Aadmi*
Somewhat Related:Â Was Rahul Gandhi really arrested at Boston in 2001?
Bonus: 6 Questions that Rahul Gandhi still hasn’t answered
P.S. Note that Anjana has made several assumptions in this post that give RG the benefit of doubt. His actual declared assets in 2004 and 2009 are reported here (emphasis added):
- In 2004, he declared total assets of Rs 22 lakh. In five years, the assets of the first-time MP have shot up 10 times to 2.25 crore.
- In 2004, he held bank deposits of Rs 11 lakh, £30,000 and $19,200; shares of Rs 3.9 lakh; LIC and other savings certificates in Rs 3.80 lakh; jewellery worth Rs 1.25 lakh; and a farm house worth Rs 9.8 lakh.
- In 2009, he holds bank deposits of about Rs 20 lakh, LIC and other savings certificates of Rs 10.2 lakh; land worth Rs 40 lakh, jewellery worth Rs 1.5 lakh; and two shops in a mall worth Rs 1.63 crore.
The above comment should be read as follows:
Courtesy: MPhil in Development Studies, Official Site – University of Cambridge
“..The course is structured around three core papers and a number of option papers, so that study pathways suited to a range of differing interests and needs can be explored. Each of the core papers – Development Economics, Institutions and Development, Sociology and Politics of Development – is taught by a member of Development Studies’ academic staff. A number of option papers are shared with other MPhil Courses (Economic and Social History: Planning Growth and Regeneration, Management and Politics)….”
Courtesy: Development Studies, Wikipedia
“It has historically placed a particular focus on issues related to social and economic development, and its relevance may therefore extend to communities and regions outside of the developing world..”
The emphasis above calls for another benefit of doubt I guess 🙂
—————————–
If you want to be a prince,
stand up tall.If you want to be a prince,
stand up tall.If you want to be a prince,
If you want to be a prince,
If you want to be a prince, be kind to all.
Jean Warren
Anjana,
As Shantanu points out in his preface, the numbers do add up mathematically. These numbers – within themselves – don’t stretch credulity.
It appears that the major investment in the company that featured in 2004 has been liquidated, and that could well explain the additional real estate investments.
Our laws ask people to declare the purchase value not “market value”, in which case all the averments re farmland may be right.
And the “Development Economics” vs. “Development Studies” thing – really, is that so material?
Frankly, the public can ask enough valid questions about Mr. Gandhi’s performance as a MP, or the leader of his party, and semi-informed analysis of his asset and qualification submissions isn’t of great value.
@Kshitij: Yes, I am inclined to give all the benefit of doubt but repeating the same mistake in 2 affidavits 5 years apart does make one wonder!
@Nikhil: I would love to meet the “seller” who “sold” 9 acres of farmland in Mehrauli at Rs 1lakh per acre (approx.)! Sweet deal, no?!
The point about serious questions is well taken though – not that it has not been attempted in the past (pl see Related links at the end of the post).
Btw, going by the standards of “sensational” news that make headlines these days, this can be termed as at least mildly sensational!
Nikhil: To add to the above, although the questions may appear to be trivial, I don’t think it is fair to dismiss them entirely..
There are some serious questions around the reason(s) behind the v significant increase in his assets..
I remembered reading something about his mysterious company BackOps – and sure enough, here is some info:
http://www.rediff.com/money/2004/may/28rahul.htm
Rahul Gandhi owns 83% in mystery Mumbai firm
BS Bureau in Mumbai | May 28, 2004 08:51 IST
…even though the affidavit filed by Gandhi with his nomination papers for the Amethi Lok Sabha seat reads that he owns 83 per cent stake in ‘Backops Services’, the fourth floor office of the firm at Puran Nivas on Arthur Bunder Road, Colaba, displays the name ‘Backops Engineering’.
The company has an official website — back-ops.com, which contains the bare minimum information about the company’s job and lists a mobile number, 35452225, to contact the company. The phone was switched off on Thursday.
Housed near the Taj Mahal Hotel, adjacent to the Radio Club, the Mumbai office of Backops employs about 10 people. Nobody knows who the ‘boss’ is here.
When Business Standard visited the building in the evening, the office was locked and no employee was seen. The 50-year-old building also houses a foreign exchange dealer, a firm of architects, an export house and a dental clinic.
Employees of some of these companies, under condition of anonymity, said they have often seen Gandhi here. “He was seen last about six months back. Normally he comes here every three to four months. Milind Deora (son of Murli Deora and a Congress MP) also comes here accompanying him,” one of them said.
“Gandhi stays at the Taj Mahal Hotel whenever he comes to this office. Often, he is accompanied by foreign friends. Those days, lunch for the office comes from the five-star hotel,” pointed out another.
An afternoon paper in Mumbai reported that the company was involved in the construction of the international airport building in Mumbai, the Belapur railway station in Navi Mumbai, a container freight station for Maersk Sealand, a commercial complex at Phoenix Mills at Lower Parel in Mumbai, the Wockhardt headquarters and the Wockhardt Hospital at Mulund in Mumbai, the IPCL township at Nagothane in Maharashtra, among others. Wockhardt officials have denied any involvement with the company.
A Mumbai-based leading civil engineering firm said it has no knowledge of Backops’ existence. “If such big projects were done in this city, some part of the work should have been sub-contracted. But no such thing has happened,” senior executives of the firm pointed out.
Hi Shantanu:
Given that the said land has been with the family since at least the early 1970s (and maybe even earlier), I’d say the “seller” who “sold” it for that sum hardly gave a sweet deal.
And the BackOps article in BS/ Rediff is puerile in its errors. Back then, I asked 5-6 people and got a much more complete picture – cross verified – than what this lazy piece paints. BackOps had nothing to do with executing any of those infra projects, Taj wasn’t RG’s base in Bombay, many employees knew who the “boss” was, etc.
Look, I hold no brief for RG, and I’ve written enough on the travesty that UPA-II has been.
All I’m saying is that we need higher standards in critique because without that, we only add to the noise, not the signal.
@Nikhil: My last (& somewhat hurried) comment on this:
1] “Look, I hold no brief for RG, and I’ve written enough on the travesty that UPA-II has been.” This I agree with – completely!
2] Questions around assets (esp. those that stretch credulity are legitimate – in my opinion). There are 2 agri land holdings that appear in 2009 (not to mention the shops in Saket). The Faridabad land also appears at a “nice” price of approx 4.5L per acre (not at all clear when it was purchase but presumably after 2004).
3] The more important question – which Anjana has not raised here (since we have no proof) – is the extent of “assets” that do not find mention here. There are still far too many questions around this (Bofors comes to mind straightaway) for me to believe that this is all RG possesses. Not sure if we will ever find out.
4] As for the “higher standards in critique”, yes agree with that (as I mentioned previously). Several serious attempts at getting answers to policy-related questions have been made as well (I’m not just referring to the posts here) but all we have had is silence – to the best of my knowledge.
The main purpose of this post was to bring down the “halo” that some people seem to associate with this otherwise good-looking but average guy who may end up controlling our destinies – thanks to circumstances..
Thanks for the thoughtful comments/points and adding to the discussion.
Isn’t it ironical that in India, when most of the politicians and chief ministers are uneducated people ruling the country, people still make a big hue and cry about just one person just because he is from the Gandhi lineage?!!!
@Anita,
Before making a sweeping statement like “when most of the politicians and chief ministers are uneducated people ruling the country” you could have atleast checked the facts. I’d urge you to go through this page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chief_Ministers_in_India) and see for yourself that not one CM is uneducated. As a matter of fact most of the CMs we have are well educated. It is a myth that most of our CMs are uneducated. Reading helps, and if your were to do your reading, you’d raise the same question about RG as raised above.
It is a sober and balanced analysis the author can probe further in to cambridge M M phil- is it course work or project or honorary?
I appreciate the authors efforts and more power to her key board
Firstly congratulations to Anjana Bharatiya.
@ Shantanu – As for the education and the mentiomn of either development economics or development studies. It is a matter of specalisation.
For example my MSc degree can be termed as MSc System level Integration, but due to the modules I specalised in I correctly give the inforamtion I have had to say MSc System on Chip design as opposed to System level Integration – there are subtlities! Hence there is no need to read too much into the degree.
Also if you can re-collect I have previously shared with you relevant information pertining to his qualitifaction which also proves that he did indeed pass his degree. Also you may want to remember he was in Cambridge with a pseudo name as opposed to his real name.
As for his assets – let us not forget the assets are not just from his salary, but also what none of us know is monies that can be drawn from all the Nehru-Gandhi Trusts. Royalties from Nehru’s books whicha re still being reprinted?, May be Sonia’s naming the assets in his Rahul’s name but the source of funds are from Sonia Gandhi or family wealth.
Though the analysis is very good and does pose some questions, all that gets submited via affidavit to EC is just a consolidated statement. I am sure there is more to the accounting than that it meets the eye!
I am totally with author in asking relevant questions to their representatives!
Hi B Shantanu,
I just wanna to ask is it possible to get M phill degree after 1 year of completion of Graduation as per UK university rules or eligibility norms as i know much about India but not sure about UK.
From Probe Swamy’s charges against Rahul: EC to returning officer:
The Election Commission has asked the returning officer of Amethi Lok Sabha constituency to probe allegations by Subramanian Swamy that Rahul Gandhi gave “wrong information” regarding his assets while filing nomination papers in the 2009 polls.
…
The letter written by principal secretary RK Srivastava also said if the returning officer is satisfied that the affidavit contained false statement, he can take appropriate follow up action.
…
“The Commission may be kept informed of the action taken in the matter,” the letter said.
Swamy had earlier this month alleged that Gandhi did not show shares owned by him in Associated Journals which ran the now-defunct National Herald newspaper in the affidavit he filed during Lok Sabha elections in 2009.
http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/headon/entry/what-they-don-t-teach-you-at-harvard-business-school
What they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School
Minhaz Merchant
16 November 2012, 01:18 PM IST
.
107
Question: how do you convert Rs.50 lakh into Rs.1,600 crore? You won’t get an answer from any of the learned professors at Harvard Business School. But you will if you hire a clever Indian chartered accountant.
Here’s how it goes. You run a political party. You accept “donations†from the public. Your audited balance sheets show that, between 2004-05 and 2010-11, you received Rs. 2,008 crore in donations – officially. As a political party you are exempt from all taxes – income-tax, service tax, capital gains tax.
So you have a fairly healthy corpus of reserves which you are supposed to use – as per Election Commission (EC) guidelines – strictly for “political†purposes.
So what do you do? Why, you go right ahead and give an unsecured loan of Rs. 90 crore from your political party’s healthy fund reserves, built through public donations, to a defunct newspaper publishing company.
This company, by sheer coincidence, has a debt of Rs. 90 crore. The loan from your party extinguishes that debt and makes the defunct newspaper publishing company debt-free and employee-free.
But does the defunct newspaper publishing company have any value? Well, it owns, among other assets, a large building in the heart of Delhi on land specifically granted to newspaper publishing companies to publish newspapers. The estimated value of the building? Rs.1,600 crore.
So, here we have a defunct newspaper publishing company which does not publish anything, much less a newspaper, with zero debt, zero employees, near-zero sundry expenses – and a building worth Rs. 1,600 crore.
Now what? Your clever Indian chartered accountant, not all those learned professors at Harvard Business School, provides the answer: float a new non-profit company to buy up the defunct company’s shares for a token Rs. 50 lakh.
Kosher? Absolutely.
Laws broken? Perhaps.
But it will take a decade or more to prove they were – if they were – and public memory is conveniently short.
But, your spokesmen say, the political party made “no commercial gain†from the Rs. 90-crore loan transaction. Exactly. The political party in fact made a commercial loss of Rs. 90 crore (the unsecured loan). The commercial gain was made by the new non-profit company which now owns a building valued at Rs. 1,600 crore, having paid just Rs. 50 lakh to buy 100% shareholding in the defunct newspaper publishing company.
Interestingly, 76% of the shares of this new asset-rich but non-profit company belong to two senior leaders of the party. Since the defunct newspaper publishing company was owned by dozens of now-deceased shareholders of the grand old party, should not the shares of the new non-profit company belong to the party as a cooperative rather than to a few individuals? Ah, but this is no ordinary political party. It’s a family enterprise.
What next? No newspaper is being published from the building. All staff have left. The building is empty. The clever Indian chartered account regards this as a criminal waste of real estate.
Rent it out, he says, and you do. The income after all can always be set off against expenditure designated under the head “charitable purposes†so that your balance sheet shows no profit. That takes care of the letter, if not the spirit, of the law.
Is renting space in your building illegal? It may not be if your new company has as one of its objectives in its Articles of Association the business of renting real estate. And if it doesn’t, it can always be appended later by your clever chartered accountant.
If, on the other hand, you now restart the paper, under media and political duress, all floors of the building will be needed for operations. Hundreds of retrenched staff will have to be re-hired. The current income from rent will vanish. Expenditure will spiral. Daily newspapers can lose as much as Rs. 100 crore a year. Another Rs. 90 crore debt write-off may be required in the near future. So restarting a newspaper under duress is a poor option, your chartered accountant tells you.
But what would the Harvard Business School professor, having heard both sides of the story, recommend you do?
Simple. Reverse the entire transaction, he’d say. Return the Rs. 90-crore unsecured loan to your political party. Restore ownership of the Rs. 1,600-crore building to the original defunct newspaper publishing company by transfering back to it the 100% shareholding your new non-profit company bought from it for Rs. 50 lakh.
If you do that, this episode will become required reading as a Harvard Business School case study titled: “How to place public interest above private interest”.
And if you don’t? You might well lose the next general election and have to restart the newspaper after all.
Excerpts from The Raul Vinci Chronicles:
..
The MPhil Development Studies program requires 4 full papers to be completed and it lists 60% as a pass, 65% as eligible for an entry to PhD and 75% as a Distinction.
Raul Vinci a.k.a Rahul Gandhi while not earning any distinctions in any of the 4 papers barely managed an overall pass percentage of 62.8%.
But the real shocker is in the Paper on “National Economic Planning & Policy” he scored 58% which is not even considered a Pass.
@Sonu (#11): This is what I found out:
Apparently MPhil in Camb is only one year.
It has a dissertation component
Also “..the nature of teaching at Cambridge is heavily focused on one-on-one supervisions with someone picked to match your interests, and thus there’s not really any need for the courses to appear “interdisciplinary” – the outlines are exactly that, and you will have a lot of control over what you spend your time studying.
and “..to apply for practically any arts masters course at Cambridge, a degree in almost any arts subject will do.”