An eloquent speaker, she was often the BJP's first choice for addressing the party's press conferences and defending it during debates in Parliament
Smriti Irani
The firebrand actor-turned-politician held portfolios of HRD, Textiles and Information & Broadcasting Minister during the tenure of the Narendra Modi-led NDA government's maiden tenure from 2014-2019. She often courted controversies, with the latest on her educational qualification stated in the affidavit submitted by her to the Election Commission while filing her nomination from Amethi. During the campaign in Amethi, Irani was often locked in a war of words with Congress general secretary in-charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who dubbed her as an "outsider" and last month accused her of distributing shoes in order to insult Rahul Gandhi and said the people in the Congress chief's Lok Sabha constituency were not beggars. Filing her 2019 nomination, Irani said she passed secondary school examination in 1991 and senior secondary school examination in 1993. She said she did not complete her Bachelor of Commerce (Part-I), a three-year degree course from Delhi University's School of Open Learning in 1994.
In a previous affidavit, she had reportedly said she graduated from the university in 1994, triggering a row over the veracity of her claim, with opposition parties alleging she was not a graduate. Irani became the youngest cabinet minister in 2014 after the BJP won a massive victory in the Lok Sabha polls and was assigned the high-profile Human Resource Development (HRD) portfolio. However, she was shifted out of the HRD Ministry to Textiles after a two-year tenure replete with controversies. Her stint as the Information & Broadcasting Minister was also controversial ¿ from reportedly fighting with the Prasar Bharati Board to issuing a notification on 'fake news', which was apparently withdrawn at the behest of the PMO. An eloquent speaker, she was often the BJP's first choice for addressing the party's press conferences and defending it during debates in Parliament.
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