Sondhi removed as ICSSR chairman

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, JULY 18. The Government today decided to remove Prof. M.L. Sondhi from the chairmanship of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) on the ground that he had lost the confidence of the council members.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development announced in a notification that the Additional Secretary in the Department of Secondary and Higher Education, Mr. K.S. Sarma, had been appointed ICSSR chairman as a purely temporary measure pending the nomination of a regular incumbent.

For sometime now, Prof. Sondhi has been in the eye of a storm in the council for his style of functioning. But, of late, he had begun speaking out against senior members of the Union Cabinet and making allegations against different Government departments.

Invariably, he would address all these complaints to the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, to whom he is believed to be close. Given Prof. Sondhi's penchant for dropping the Prime Minister's name for getting things done, the Ministry is said to have kept Mr. Vajpayee informed of the decision to remove him.

Just this week, at Agra on the fringes of the Vajpayee-Musharraf summit, Prof. Sondhi had said that the Ministries of External Affairs, Home and HRD had made it difficult for the ICSSR to organise the Indo-Pak. social scientists' dialogue ahead of the Agra summit. Last week, he wrote to the Prime Minister demanding the resignation of the Union Finance Minister, Mr. Yashwant Sinha, for the UTI fiasco.

Also, Prof. Sondhi - a BJP member of the Rajya Sabha - has been constantly complaining against the hardcore RSS faction within the council, alleging that they were trying to saffronise the ICSSR agenda. In fact, on the eve of the Indo-Pak. dialogue, he wrote to the President, Mr. K.R. Narayanan, urging him to ensure that the saffron caucus - led by the former editor of the RSS mouthpiece Panchajanya, Mr. Devendra Swaroop - did not sabotage the initiative. With his diatribe against senior functionaries becoming increasingly frequent, the Ministry apparently decided that the time had come to rein him in. While Mr. Swaroop has served a legal notice on Prof. Sondhi for maligning him, a member of the council, Dr. Sardindu Mukherjee - who, according to Prof. Sondhi, leads the saffron brigade within the council - tendered his resignation 10 days ago.

This apart, Prof. Sondhi - who was appointed for a three-year term on October 14, 1999 - has been accused of conducting the affairs of ICSSR without taking the council into consideration. He had seldom convened a meeting of the council; the last being in February this year. Many council members had apparently complained to the Government about his manner of functioning.

Prof. Sondhi was hosting a seminar - the `Vajpayee-Musharraf Agra summit: a preliminary assessment' - when the news of his removal was made public this afternoon.

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