Some thirty years ago the then General Secretary of the Congress Party Shri VN Gadgil had made a ridiculous statement that Sharad Pawar could never become the Prime Minister of India because he was not proficient in the English language. His hostility towards Sharad Pawar was well known. So, journalists rushed to Sharad Pawar and talked about the opinion of Shri Gadgil, then he replied that if English was the criterion to become the Prime Minister, the Professors of English in the universities would be better than most of the politicians. But can they become Ministers or Prime Minister? The myth of English has been broken by the present Prime Minister. The country will remain indebted to him for the pride of place that he has given to Hindi. Now in the twenty-first century, it can be safely said that knowledge of Hindi is essential to become the Prime Minister of India.
However, if no less than a Chief Minister is raising the meaningless controversy about the educational qualification of the Prime Minister, then one can only laugh at his shallowness and imbecility. There are certain areas and professions where educational qualifications do not matter. For example, a good lawyer may not have good academic records but those having brilliant academic qualifications may be very dullard and unworthy of properly defending their clients. A doctor having mediocre qualifications may be a good one in comparison to a person having shined educational qualifications. The same is true, more or less, for other professions like journalism.
This is not the first time such controversies have been raked. Questions have been asked about the academic degrees of Mamata Banerji, Smriti Irani and many others but any Chief Minister has not got mired him/herself in such inanities. There was one Jitender Singh Tomar, a minister in the previous Kejriwal government, who was jailed for fake degrees, but it was not because of his politics but because he attempted to get himself enrolled as an Advocate based on his fake LL. B. degree from a university, that he never even once visited.