Yogi govt to fund spread of Upadhyay’s message in varsities

LUCKNOW : The Yogi Adityanath government has decided to provide funds to promote the ideology of Pt Deen Dayal Upadhyay, co- founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (the ruling BJP’s forerunner), in state universities.

According to a government order dated December 1, 2017, Rs 7 crore will be distributed among these 14 state universities for this purpose of spreading the message of Upadhyaya, whose birth centenary the BJP governments at the Centre and the state have celebrated with much fanfare.

The universities will get Rs 25 lakh each as the first instalment to initiate the work of establishing a chair in Upadhyaya’s name with certain conditions.

The money will be used to set up a corpus of funds, the interest from which will be used in conducting seminars, workshops and symposiums next year.The universities have been asked to spend 10% of the amount in establishing the chair and setting up a library that will have books on Upadhyaya. As much as 40% of the amount will be used in setting up infrastructure for establishing the chair. Universities have been asked to send utilisation certificate from time to time .

The 14 universities are: M. J. P. Rohilkhand University, Bareilly; Dr BR Ambedkar University, Agra; CSJMU, Kanpur; Dr RML Avadh University, Faizabad; Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut; SSU, Varanasi, MGKV, Varanasi; Bundelkhand University, Jhansi; DDU Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur; Veer Bahadur Singh Purvanchal University, Jaunpur; Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti Urdu, Arabi Farsi University, Lucknow; Siddharth University, Siddharth Nagar; Allahabad State University, Allahabad and Jananayak Chandrashekhar University, Ballia

In February, the UGC cleared a proposal that allows universities to create a chair in the name of Upadhyay, a key RSS ideologue. Prior to this, the UGC had established chairs in the name of personalities, including Mahatma Gandhi and Motilal Nehru.

VK Karan, a faculty member of Lucknow’s Vidyant Hindu PG College, said, “Through universities, the government will look to spread the message of ‘antyodaya’ (uplift of weaker sections) and ‘ekatma manavad’ (integral humanism) propagated by Pt Deen Dayal Upadhyay.”

The Central government rewarded Karan with Rs 50,000 in 2016 for preparing a vision document with reference to the BJP ideologue.

For its part, the opposition has always objected to efforts to propagate Upadhyay’s ideology in UP. Senior Samajwadi Party leader and former minister Azam Khan halted installation of Upadhyay’s statue in Rampur, saying erecting a statue on the road was violation of a court order.

Similarly, when the BJP organised the quiz across schools and colleges in UP to ‘test’ the knowledge of students about saffron ideologues, the move kicked up a storm with the Congress asking the BJP to order a probe to find out who ‘murdered’ Upadhyay.

The Jana Sangh co-founder was found dead at the Mughalsarai railway station, which has now been renamed as Deen Dayal Nagar, in 1968.