However, the CPR has denied the existence of such a report. In a letter sent to Joshi on March 3, the president and chief executive of the CPR, Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta, has said the centre “has released no such report on the Sachar Committee’s findings, could you kindly issue a clarification about the report you cite. This would only be fair to the authors of the report. And it would also prevent people from erroneously assuming that the Centre for Policy Research is putting its credibility behind a report it did not produce.”

The letter goes on to say that while “individual faculty members have, on occasion, expressed their views on the Sachar Committee Report... they are uncomfortable with CPR’s name being used (even if erroneously) to lend credibility to someone else’s arguments.”

When contacted by The Sunday Express, Joshi said the article was mistakenly attributed to the CPR. “I meant the Centre for Policy Studies in Chennai which does research, reviews policy etc. This paper I have quoted is a year-old. If I had just written what I felt, you would have said Joshiji keeps saying all this anyway. Therefore, I have quoted the paper verbatim,” he said.

The Centre for Policy Studies in Chennai was founded in 1990, and has amongst its trustees and founder members S Gurumurthy, Govindacharya, Balbir Punj and others known to be close to the RSS. The author of the paper which Joshi has quoted is J K Bajaj, the director of the Centre for Policy Studies, who has earlier done a study on the religious demography of India. His specialisation, according to the institute is “theoretical physics”.