Senior Congress leader B K Chandrashekar on Wednesday said that the BJP-led Centre’s diktat to universities to observe September 29 as Surgical Strike Day was “illegal and Constitutionally invalid.”
The former minister told a press conference that passing such an order was outside the University Grants Commission (UGC) charter. "The UGC’s charter is to improve quality of higher education, regulating teacher recruitment and so on. But then, UGC is no longer an autonomous institution," he rued.
The decision to observe Surgical Strike Day on September 29 was purely political, he said, keeping the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in mind. "This amounts to politicising army operations. Also, why choose the surgical strike that took place on September 29 to celebrate? Weren’t there strikes before 2016,” he asked.