‘SHAME ON US’: MODI FACES CRITICISM FOR USING NOTES IN PUTIN MEETING

Another X user says: “PM Modi is asking Putin to stop the war. He is speaking in Hindi as if Putin understands Hindi.”

“PM Modi is asking Putin to stop the war. He is speaking in Hindi as if Putin understands Hindi.”

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— Facts (@BefittingFacts) August 31, 2026

The controversy over Narendra Modi’s degrees began years earlier. In 2016, during a defamation case filed by Modi against political opponents, the matter was sub-judice in a court in Ahmedabad. As part of the legal process, the court had accepted the degrees as evidence.

Amit Shah, the Bharatiya Janata Party president at the time, held a press conference on May 10, 2016, to present to the media documents that he claimed were authenticated copies of Modi’s degrees. The stated goal was to put an end to the speculation. However, the documents presented by Shah had the opposite effect and became the subject of intense scrutiny and further ridicule.

The documents shown were a bachelor’s degree (BA) from Delhi University and a master’s degree (MA) from Gujarat University. The documents, critics claimed, had obvious anomalies.

The BA degree from Delhi University (dated March 23, 1979) appeared to be computer-printed. This was a major point of contention. In 1979, personal computers were virtually non-existent in India, and official documents like degrees were almost exclusively typewritten. The use of a modern, computer-generated font (like Times New Roman, which was created in 1931 but only became widespread with desktop publishing in the 1980s and ’90s) on a document supposedly from 1979 raised serious doubts about its authenticity, critics claimed.

Seven days after Amit Shah’s press conference, Chandan Nandy published Modi’s marksheets for his BA examination along with one of his contemporary’s in The Quint and noted six purported discrepancies.

The Aam Adami Party looked into the matter and said that no one named “Narendra Damoderdas Modi” had passed out of the Delhi University in 1978, as Modi had claimed in his 2014 affidavit. It produced the degree certificate of a person named “Narendra Mahavir Modi” from Alwar, Rajathan. The party alleged that the degree certificate presented by Shah was fake. The BJP did not respond to the claim.

Critics also said that the Master’s degree displayed by Shah stated that Modi had completed his studies in “Entire Political Science” as opposed to the standard phrasing “Political Science”. Critics claimed this was further evidence that the document was not genuine.

Despite these anomalies, the BJP and Amit Shah maintained that the degrees were absolutely genuine and obtained legally from the universities. Both Delhi University and Gujarat University issued statements affirming that Narendra Modi had been a bona fide student and that the degrees were authentic. They addressed some of the queries, such as the phrase “entire”, as a matter of standard university nomenclature in translation.

In March 2017, the court in Ahmedabad dismissed a criminal defamation case filed by Modi against leaders of the Aam Aadmi Party who had questioned the authenticity of the degrees. The court said that the act of questioning the documents did not amount to criminally defaming the prime minister. However, this was not a ruling on the authenticity of the degrees themselves.

The issue also played out in RTI requests, with the chief information commission eventually ordering Delhi University to allow inspection of its records of all students who passed the BA exam in 1978 (the year Modi claimed to have graduated). The university challenged this order in the High Court, citing privacy concerns. The recent judgement related to this case.