IDUKKI: With a huge clamour over her doctorate due to bloopers and allegations of plagiarism in the dissertation, State Youth Commission chairperson Chintha Jerome on Tuesday said that she was being targeted for an inadvertent error. She also denied allegations of plagiarism and said that a minor error was magnified and used to defame a woman.
The young CPM leader has been in the news for allegations that her doctoral dissertation on ‘The ideological foundation of Malayalam commercial cinema in the neoliberal times’, wrongly attributed the Malayalam poem Vazhakkula to the poet Vyloppilli, while it was originally written by Changampuzha. She is also being accused of plagiarising from the Bodhi Commons website article published in 2010.
Speaking to the media, Chintha said Vazhakkula is not a poem unfamiliar to her.
“I have read and spoken about the poem at many public events. However, despite the thesis undergoing various scrutinizing, fact-checking and proofreading procedures by experts, unfortunately, the error was not corrected. I did not notice the mistake even as I read the thesis several times,” she said.
She added that the error was an accidental one that could happen to any human. “However the minor error was magnified and used as a tool for character assassination and to defame a woman,” she said.
While expressing her gratitude to the persons who found out about the mistake, Chintha said steps are progressing to convert the thesis into a book and the error pointed out in the research paper will be corrected in the book.
Regarding the allegations of plagiarism, she said that it is a fake allegation. “Not only Bodhi Commons but several articles from many websites have also been used for reference purposes in the thesis. However none of them has been copied, but the idea in such articles has been mentioned in the thesis and those websites and articles have been mentioned in the reference section as well,” she said.
GOVERNOR SEEKS REPORT FROM KERALA UNIVERSITY
T’Puram: Governor Arif Mohammed Khan, in his capacity as chancellor of state universities, has sought a report from the vice chancellor of Kerala University on the allegations of factual errors and plagiarism in the doctoral thesis of Youth Commission chairperson Chintha Jerome.
The Save University Campaign Committee had on Monday approached the governor with a petition seeking a directive to the varsity to conduct a probe into Chintha’s PhD thesis. The whistleblowers’ forum had also demanded the cancellation of the guideship of KU former pro-vice-chancellor P P Ajayakumar, who was Chintha’s research supervisor.