Rajneesh Arora belongs to a family of teachers in Amritsar with close links to the RSS. He himself rose to state vice-president of the Sangh.
Chandigarh: Rajneesh Arora, the 59-year-old former vice-chancellor of the Punjab Technical University arrested by the state vigilance bureau Monday, was the sah prant sanghchalak – loosely translated to state vice-president of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – until a month before he was appointed V-C in 2008.
Arora belongs to an illustrious family from Amritsar; his parents were both school teachers. His father Mathura Dass was a staunch RSS activist who was well known in Amritsar for courting arrest while opposing the ban imposed by the central government on the RSS after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Mathura Dass also remained secretary of the Punjab Government Aided School Teachers Union and spearheaded an agitation in 1967 for better salaries for school teachers.
Rajneesh himself was a brilliant student, the state topper in the matric and intermediate examinations. During the Emergency, Rajneesh, then a first-year B.Tech. student at IIT Delhi, and his younger brother Avnish, then a class 10 student, courted arrest.
The RSS days
Arora completed his electrical engineering course in 1979 and joined the RSS as a ‘pracharak’ in Delhi. He took to social work and, in 1983, co-founded ‘Vikas Bharati’ — an NGO for the application of science and technology for tribal people — in village Bishnupur (now in Jharkhand). He and his wife lived in that village, which did not even have electricity, for 10 years.
During this period, he also volunteered with the Consortium on Rural Technology (CORT), a Gandhian Organisation, and completed his Ph.D. in Integrated Energy Planning from IIT Delhi in 1989.
He was the deputy general manager at Khalilabad Sugar Mill in Uttar Pradesh for two years in a bid to revive the sick mill. In 1997, he joined the Guru Nanak Dev University (GNDU) as reader in the department of Electronics and Communication in 1997. He later became dean (alumni) and director (placement) at GNDU.
He also went on to become principal of a private engineering college in Amritsar.
Through all these years, he remained actively involved in RSS activities in Amritsar and became second only to the prant sanghchalak in the RSS. He only gave up the position weeks before he was appointed as V-C of the PTU in December 2008.
Controversies at PTU
In 2012, Arora decided to start moral education and professional ethics courses at PTU, as part of the post graduate and doctorate programmes. His alleged aim was to incorporate the RSS ideology in university teaching. The courses began in 2014, but were shut down in 2017, two years after his tenure ended.
His reign as V-C first ran into controversy when in 2012, the CBI began investigations against V.N. Rajasekharan Pillai, a former V-C of the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), and found that he had connived with PTU officials including the V-C to illegally approve PTU’s distance education centres.
In 2013, an FIR was also registered in Delhi against the PTU for opening thousands of illegal distance education centres across India. These were later ordered to be shut down by the UGC.
Apart from allegations of financial misdeeds, Arora has also been accused of illegal appointments, many of which were allegedly done at the behest of the BJP and the RSS.
Among others, the FIR mentions the name of Mrs Geetika Sood, legal officer, PTU. She is the daughter of former BJP minister Tikshan Sood. The FIR states that she had not attached any documents with her application which could prove her experience.
Ideal nationalist
Former Punjab cabinet minister Laxmi Kanta Chawla, a prominent BJP leader from Amritsar who knew the Arora family closely said: “I don’t know what happened in PTU. I only knew Rajneesh as an ideal nationalist.”
Chawla added: “He was a brilliant student and could have easily got a high paying job. But he chose to spend the best years of his youth serving tribals in jungles. His family contributed immensely to education in Amritsar. They run the Vikram Vidyalaya here which inculcated the spirit of patriotism among students. Rajneesh’s wife carries on that tradition.
“Rajneesh would have continued to work through his NGO but came back to Amritsar following the untimely death of his younger brother, a doctor.”
Exemplary punishment should be given to such people who wear mask of nationalist and betray their country for self interest.