PIL alleges JNU associate professor plagiarised thesis
NEWDELHI: A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) has been filed in the Delhi High Court against an associate professor of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) alleging that the thesis submitted by him is plagiarised, a charge that he has refuted vehemently.
The complainant, Nadeem Akhtar, a research scholar, had earlier approached the university which let off Ishtiaque Ahmed, then assistant professor, with a warning. The plea has now sought cancellation of Ahmed’s PHD degree and sought directions from the court to prohibit him from supervising and guiding any Mphil or PHD students in JNU till the pendency of the plea.
The university had conducted an enquiry against Ahmed — currently associate professor with the Centre for Persian and Central Asian Studies (CP and CAS), School of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies (SLL and CS) — after receiving the complaint that he had plagiarised texts and footnotes from various books of writers in his PHD thesis. The complaint was put before the university’s executive council on September 18, 2017 and the council issued him a warning but did not take any action.
“An enquiry was conducted by a team of experts after this complaint. They had submitted a report to the executive council of the university but the EC did not recognize this as plagiarism and had said that he should be more careful in the future,” JNU registrar Pramod Kumar said, adding that the university did not have any set plagiarism policy in place.
Ahmed refuted all charges levelled against him. He said the allegations are baseless and had been made to malign him. “This is a very old case. This is propaganda
This is propaganda against me... I have already been cleared by the executive council. ISHTIAQUE AHMED, associate professor
against me. An assistant professor has been trying to malign my image by passing some selected documents to his PHD student. I have already been cleared by the executive council,” Ahmed said.
According to the plea, Ahmed had submitted his thesis in July, 2000 and was awarded PHD in Persian Language from JNU on his thesis “Political Radicalism in Pre-islamic Revolutionary Persian Literature of Iran with special reference to the writings of Dr. Ali Shariati”.
The plea, filed through advocate Akshita Raina, claims that a huge chunk of Ahmed’s thesis has been lifted verbatim from 15 different sources. “The respondent has not only plagiarised texts and footnotes from various books of writers in his PHD thesis but has also plagiarised the conclusion of his thesis using the conclu- sion of an eminent writer, as his own; which defeats the entire purpose of submitting an original thesis for the award of the PHD degree,” the plea alleged.
The plea, which is likely to come up for hearing on Friday also alleges repeated plagiarism in a book titled “Iranian Politics: Intellectuals and Ulama” which Ahmed claims to have authored. “Unfortunately, there is a disproportionate verbatim and the portion purported to be authored by him belongs to other authors,” the plea said.
The plea claimed that the petitioner had written several letters to authorities, including the vicechancellor of JNU on April 25 apprising the issue of repeated plagiarism, and filed an RTI. He alleged that the university is trying to shield the professor.
The registrar, in its letter on January 9, disclosed that the complaint had been sent to three external experts who gave Ahmed a clean chit. However, the Central Public Information Officer declined to provide the details of the external experts, their credentials, comments and their conclusion regarding the matter under Section 8 of the RTI Act.