Karzai receives Lovely Professional degree

At a stopover in Jalandhar Monday on his way to New Delhi for meetings with Indian officials, Afghan President Hamid Karzai was presented with an honorary doctorate from what claims to be India’s largest private university. Indian President Pranab Mukherjee conferred the degree on Karzai, making him an honorary alumnus of Lovely Professional University — a school that bills itself as "a world-renowned center for the creation and dissemination of knowledge."

LPU was founded by the late Shri Baldev Raj Mittal, who earned his fortune as chairman of the Lovely Group, which began as a distributor of traditional Indian sweets before delving into scooters and automobiles.

As for Karzai, who did his undergraduate and graduate studies at Simla University in India in the late 1970s and early 80s, he will add the award to an already long list of honorary degrees. In 2003, his alma mater presented him with an honorary doctorate in literature, to go with the master’s degree in international relations and political science he earned two decades earlier. Karzai has also received honorary degrees from Boston University, Georgetown University, the University of Nebraska, and, just last year, Japan’s Sports Science University of Nippon.

According to some quick Googling, it is the first time Karzai has been associated with the words "lovely professional," however.