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June 18, 2006
An Easy Way to get a Ph.D. Degree from the Universities.....!
The Universities both in India and US seem to be plagued with plagiarism these days and very much competing with each other in spreading the epidemic all over. On the heels of the recent episode of Miss Kavya Viswanathan of Harvard lifting the passages from the two novels of Mr Megan Mcafferty, the next turn seems to be of Dr Ramakant Jha of the Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapeeth University, one of the three Universities in the ancient city of learning, i.e., Banaras. Dr Jha has profusely copied major portions of my thesis (1976) verbatim and got the doctoral degree from the above Universtiy named after Mahatma Gandhi! What an Experiment with the Truth by Dr Jha ! The hither too unknown academic theft made by him 25 years ago, has come to my knowledge only three weeks ago !
One of my good old friends of my student days (1967-76) in the Banaras Hindu University, Sri Srivatsa Goswami of Vrindavan, sent me an unexpected e-mail last month drawing my attention to a book in Hindi published in 2005 by a famous indological book publishers, Chowkhamba Vidyabhavan, in Banaras. The name of the book is: “Suta Samhita Mimamsa (skanda puranantargat sutasamhita ka samikshatmak Adhyayan), Varanasi: 2005, pp.285, Vidyabhavana Prachyavidya Granthamala 155, Rs.300.”
The title of the book very much resembled the topic of my doctoral thesis in English namely: “A Critical Study of the Suta Samhita” for which I was awarded Ph.D. by the Banaras Hindu University as far back as 1976. Dr Padma Misra, Professor of Sanskrit (who had obtained her Ph D from London under the guidance of the world renowned Indologist Prof A L Basham), was my research guide and Dr Siddheswara Bhattacharya was then the Professor and Head of the Deptt of Sanskrit & Pali. The UGC had paid me Junior Research Fellowship for prosecuting my research studies in the Banaras Hindu University. Later on, I got another Fellowship from the University of Vienna (Austria) where I did my post-doctoral studies for the next two years (1977-79) under the guidance of Prof Dr Gerhard Oberhammer. I also used to privately teach the Sanskrit students of the Indologisches Institut of the Vienna University. After going to Vienna only, I came to know that Prof Dr Oberhammer, Professor of Sanskrit, was one of the two external examiners for my Ph D thesis and that since he knew my academic work, he had recommended my name to the University of Vienna and also to the Afro-Asian Institute for offering Fellowship for my higher studies abroad. After my return to India in early 1979 and taking over the heavy responsibilities of the religious seat of the Sirigere Math from my spiritual father, Sri Taralabalu Jagadguru Sri Shivakumara Shivacharya Mahaswamiji, I landed in a totally different atmosphere and lost contacts with the academic world. Living in the midst of the simple, unpretentious rural people of deep devotion in their hearts, my priorities turned out to be quite different from that of the intellectual academic atmosphere of the universities. Though a strong idea had come to my mind in between to publish my thesis which would not have been a difficult task for me financially, I simply shelved the matter which has resulted into the present situation.
The strong suspicions of my friend and of mine too that Dr Ramakant Jha, the author of the Hindi book ”Suta Samhita Mimamsa” might have plagiarized my unpublished thesis proved to be true beyond any doubt when the book reached my hands. As I started coloring the lines of plagiarism on every page of his book, I could not lift the pen and skip the lines. It extended not up to the end of one page but on and on to several pages continuously. The printed book consists of 285 pages. Except the first 20 pages of introductory chapter and the last 14 pages of “Upasamhar” and Bibliography, the remaining major portion of the book (almost 251 pages) is nothing but a verbatim Hindi translation of my thesis in English. The author has shamelessly copied almost 80% of my thesis including the footnotes, tables and charts, and I wonder why he left out the remaining portion of 20%. On further enquiries, I came to know that the above book is his thesis in Hindi namely, "Suta Samhita ka Alocanatmak Adhyayan" submitted to Kashi Vidyapeeth University in the year 1981 for which he got the Ph D degree. Dr Jha's thesis is literally a Hindi reproduction of my thesis (1976) - both the title and its contents. It may be an interesting study to know how he had access to my unpublished thesis. Much water has flowed down the holy river Ganga since 1981. This unholy act of Dr Jha has come to my knowledge only recently after 25 years! Will the academic sin committed by Dr Jha be washed away in the holy waters of Ganga or "dharma-kzetre kRtaM pApam vajra-lepaM bhavizyati" !
What a disgraceful intellectual fraud has been going on in the so-called Universities of higher learning! Who has to teach a lesson to these shameless spurious academicians! What is the legal procedure to bring these intellectual thieves to book? Or being a Sanyasin, not going to lose or gain anything, do you think that I should not lay claim of the intellectual property and overcome the ‘mamakara’ of my thesis and simply ignore and forget it?
With best wishes,
Dr Shivamurthy Swamiji ____________________________________________________ Sri Taralabalu Jagadguru Brihanmath, Sirigere - 577 541, Chitradurga Dist, Karnataka [India] E-mail: swamiji@taralabalu.org Web: www.taralabalu.org
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