Students sometimes plagiarise term papers, the odd scientist plagiarises scientific papers. How about the Speaker of a Legislature accused of plagiarising a former president’s speech? It happened in Maharashtra where Legislative Assembly Speaker Arun Lal Gujarathi is in a piquant situation after portions of a February 4 speech were found to have been directly lifted from an address made more than a decade ago by former President K.R. Narayanan, when he was Vice-President of India. It all happened during Gujarathi’s address to a meeting of Legislative presiding officers from all over India in Mumbai. A couple of his colleagues from other states listened in astonishment as they realised something sounded awfully familiar. And no wonder. Listen to what Gujarathi said to the 66th conference of presiding officers: n Parliament and Legislatures constitute the head and front of the body politic in India. They are the institutional embodiment of the audacious experiment in democracy launched by the founding fathers of our Republic. • There is no precedent in history in which a nation of such colossal size, complexity and population adopted the parliamentary form of government and used democratic methods and processes for the development of a country of such poverty, illiteracy and ill-health and historical economic stagnation. All very eloquent. Only, Narayanan said exactly the same thing in the Central Hall of Parliament on September 23, 1992, while addressing a nationwide assemblage of legislators, presiding officers and ministers. Narayanan’s speech was reproduced in the book Fifty Years of Parliament (edited by G.C. Malhotra). The book was brought out by the Lok Sabha Secretariat during their Golden Jubilee celebrations of Parliament last year. Narayanan, who used to write his own speeches, now knows about the incident but is offering no comments, said sources close to the former President. However, damage control is now underway. Once it was clear that the plagiarism was becoming public, officials no longer shrugged their shoulders. ‘‘I will speak to my PRO about the future course of action and communicate with Narayanan in a day or two,’’ Speaker Gujarathi told The Indian Express from his constituency of Jalgaon, where he was attending a yagna. His officials were equally contrite. Vilas Patil, principal secretary of the Legislative Council said the office of the former president would be informed that the Speaker ‘‘had referred to certain portions of Narayanan’s speech’’. Patil said the ‘‘submission’’ would be made on February 12 when Gujarathi returns to Mumbai. ‘‘We could not do it earlier as we were busy with the meeting of the presiding officers which wound up yesterday,’’ said Patil. But who wrote the speech? Government sources put the blame on ‘‘the lower levels’’ of administration. ‘‘We are not aware of where they take it from,’’ another embarrassed official said.
