Your name, my name, your degree, my degree

Some people allege that the legislators are simply using degrees belonging to people with the same name as them.

Fake-degree fever has spread to Sindh. While some people maintain that parliamentarians have bought degrees from university administrations others allege that the legislators are simply using degrees belonging to people with the same name as them.

The case of Sindh Minister for Excise and Taxation Mukesh Kumar Chawala falls somewhere in between. He was given a seat reserved for minorities in the Sindh Assembly.

According to official sources, Chawala belongs to Kashmore district and has been living in Karachi. However, according to his degree, which he submitted for the 2008 elections, he studied in a college in Thatta district under the Hyderabad Board as an external student.

“His Master’s degree, which he had submitted to the Election Commission, is genuine but his undergraduate degree is counterfeit,” sources alleged, thereby indicating that the minister had acquired his Master’s degree on the basis of a fake Bachelors.

The undergraduate degree had been bought off a man with the same name and the same father’s name as Chawala. The only difference was the surname Bansari, which did not prove to be much of a hurdle in the degree transactions, sources added.

Photocopies of the two degrees with the same seat number, 10444, have been obtained by The Express Tribune. They show that the BA examination forms have different photographs, one bearing that of Mukesh Kumar son of Baghawandas Bansari in Thatta and the other of the minister, Chawala. Other than that, details on the forms are almost identical, the only difference being that Chawala wrote down his first name as Mukesh Kumar Chawala and his surname as Bansari, exchanging his actual surname Chawala with his namesake’s surname. Chawala and Bansari are two separate families of the Hindu community.

“Later, on the basis of this [Bachelor’s degree] he did his masters from Sindh University in 2006,” said Amar Lal, a petitioner who had challenged Chawala’s degree in the election tribunal and Sindh High Court.

Lal said that due to financial constraints neither could he pursue the case nor could he hire a senior lawyer to fight it. As a result, both of the degrees were declared genuine and verified on December 12, 2007 by the election tribunal.

Talking to The Express Tribune, second-time MPA Mukesh Kumar Chawala said that these allegations were part of a conspiracy against him. All my degrees are genuine, he said.

When asked why he did his Bachelors and Masters degrees from Thatta when he lived in Kashmore, he replied, “Because my uncle Arjandas Chawala lives in Thatta, I graduated from there. The election tribunal has declared the degree genuine. There is no reason to call my degrees fake.” According to Chawala, all his education was carried out in Thatta because his uncle’s family lived there.

However, Dileep Kumar Kewalramani of the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid, who belongs to Chawala’s area, said that no member of the Chawala family lives in Thatta. “Since his degrees are counterfeit, we will now take this case to the Supreme Court in order to expose his fraud,” he added.

Publsihed in The Express Tribune, July 10^th, 2010.