Newsmaker: N Gopalaswami justifies his stance on Jio University

The former home secretary is known to be a stickler for rules and justifies his unexpected recommendation on Jio University on those grounds

N Gopalaswami had just been appointed home secretary. He was staying in a C-II type government flat, not small but not palatial either.

Now that he was home secretary, a colleague suggested, maybe it was time for him to move to a bigger house, maybe with a large estate and a garden. Gopalaswami thought about it and shook his head. “We’re just the two of us, myself and my wife. We don’t really need a bigger house. This is fine,” he said.

In a city where real estate is a currency of power, Gopalaswami let it go. By contrast, one of his predecessors, T N Seshan, whom he followed into the Election Commission many years later, armed himself not just with real estate but also physical security every step of the way. A colleague of Gopalaswami’s laughed at the comparison: “There cannot be two more different people,” he said.

N Gopalaswami was widely regarded as a model civil servant, a stickler for rules and a meticulous taker of notes while in service. A Gujarat cadre IAS officer of the 1966 batch, a trained chemist, he held various top-level posts including that of the managing director of Gujarat Communication and Electronics Limited; member (administration and purchase) in the Gujarat Electricity Board; secretary to Government (science and technology) in technical education and Secretary, Department of Revenue. Posted in Delhi between 1992 and 2004, he was Union Home Secretary and prior to that, Secretary in the Department of Culture and Secretary General in the National Human Rights Commission.

On the whole, his contemporaries considered Gopalaswami god-fearing and deeply religious rather than someone prone to challenging the system.

There was an aberration, though. As Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), he sharply criticised his colleague Naveen Chawla’s “partisan” conduct and even referred a complaint by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jaswant Singh to the President who sent it to the Prime Minister’s Office. The issue was: could a CEC pass observations against a fellow EC? The matter went up to the Supreme Court that ordered in favour of Gopalaswami.

After his retirement, he made no secret of his philosophical leanings – he is the head of Vivekananda Educational Society, which is affiliated to RSS’s educational wing Vidya Bharati or Akhil Bharatiya Shiksha Sansthan. He has associated himself with other such endeavours:  getting UNESCO to include Vedic chanting as part of the oral traditions of the world. In 2014, he was appointed chairman of the governing board of Kalakshetra.

In 2015, he was awarded a Padma Bhushan and was also appointed Chancellor of the Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth, Tirupathi for five years.

About the time he became CEC, he appeared for another examination: he attended weekend astrology classes conducted by the Astrological Society of India, and even completed four semesters and got a certificate after a three-hour examination.

He has little patience with politics. He said, after his retirement, that election commissioners should  be barred from joining political parties for 10 years after they retire. “It is better that they don’t get into politics. But if someone has this uncontrollable itch to do service to the people, let it be as an independent,” he told an interviewer.

So when the Narendra Modi government invited him to suggest ways in which India could set up higher education institutions of global standard, Gopalaswami armed himself with scholars and educational administrators of impeccable standing. There was Tarun Khanna of Harvard Business School and Renu Khator, Chancellor of the University of Houston system, among them. This month, after three months of deliberation, he came up with a report that recommended, among other things, that the Reliance group’s Jio University be given the status of a Greenfield Institute of Eminence (IoE), which puts it outside the purview of the university regulator.

This raised some questions because Jio University is yet to be set up, whereas all the others that acquired the IoE tag were institutes of long standing, such as IIT Delhi, IIT Delhi, Manipal Academy, BITS Pilani and IISC Bengaluru.

His argument? The committee had set certain criteria for such an institute (requiring the sponsoring entity to have a steep net worth of $50 billion and a track record of achievement in any field) -- and Jio had met the criteria.

When local newspapers spoke to Gopalaswami about the issue, he was acerbic. "To anybody who asks me why Jio, my counter question would be: why not Jio?" he said. He added that there was a tendency to attack and criticise the wealthy. "In case of a bike hitting a pedestrian, it's always a biker who is considered wrong and in case of car hitting a bike it is always the car driver who is assumed to be defaulter - I see a similarity between the recent decision and these simple examples," he responded.

Gopalaswami has been a stickler for rules all his life. It is unlikely that he will deviate from them now. But the question worth asking is: who made the rules and for whom?