Smriti Irani

For the HRD Ministry’s attempt to make students attend school on Christmas to celebrate AB Vajpayee’s birthday

This would have made students toil on a day that most of the world has a holiday for Christmas. Irani took to Twitter to say that the Times of India article which revealed this was misleading and that it was not compulsory for students to participate. But a reporter of the daily newspaper then put up a scanned copy of a circular that gave credence to its version of the story: even though it didn’t say ‘compulsory’, the circular exhorted schools to ‘encourage the participation of students’.

One could grant Irani the benefit of doubt if not for the repeated instances where policy seems to be getting tweaked in a certain saffron direction, like the imposition of Sanskrit as a third language in Centrally run government schools.