In a country where politicians can lie on national television without consequence, where conspiracy theories pass for prime-time news, and where entire chapters of history are either whitewashed or deleted depending on who’s in power—why, pray, is a decades-old memoir by a long-dead secretary still banned?
Yes, we’re talking about M.O. Mathai’s Reminiscences of the Nehru Age—a book so scandalously honest, so inconveniently accurate, that it managed to send India’s grand old party into cardiac arrest when it first appeared. Mathai, the personal secretary—read: shadow, alter ego, confidant—of Jawaharlal Nehru for over a decade, dared to do the unthinkable: tell the truth.
And what did this truth-telling get him? Vilification, censorship, and the honour of being the author of one of the most selectively “banned” books in Indian history. Even Bangladesh reportedly felt the tremors. That’s quite the legacy for a man who wasn’t even a politician.
The question is this: why is the Narendra Modi-led NDA government still sitting on its hands when it comes to lifting this absurd ban? For a party that claims to want to “correct” the record of Indian history, they sure seem terrified of a man who hasn’t been alive for nearly 40 years.
Is it because Mathai didn’t just expose Nehru’s political decisions—he dismantled the man’s carefully cultivated halo? This was no armchair critic. Mathai was the gatekeeper to India’s first Prime Minister’s thoughts, desires, whims, and secrets. From 1946 to 1959, he knew what Nehru ate, drank, desired, and despised. And he wrote it all down.
He wrote about Nehru’s poor judgment, his suspicious tilt towards the British even after independence, and his dangerous infatuation with certain foreign powers. He sketched the embarrassing behind-the-scenes drama: Krishna Menon’s oddities, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit’s shopping sprees abroad, Feroze Gandhi’s cutthroat ambition, and Lord Mountbatten’s unrelenting thirst for pomp, titles, and praise. This wasn’t gossip. It was an insider’s logbook from the cockpit of Indian power.
And the Congress couldn’t take it. So, they did what insecure regimes do best—suppress, smear, and censor.
But here’s the kicker: the ban wasn’t even fully formal. Sections were pulled, publications were muzzled, and Mathai was painted as bitter and unreliable. All this, because his book threatened to pop the bubble of Nehruvian sainthood. And now, more than four decades and ten years of a non-Congress government later, the ban—like the worst habits of the Congress—is still quietly in place.
Why?
Could it be that even the BJP, for all its chest-thumping nationalism, is too scared to touch the Nehru legacy with a ten-foot pole unless it’s through carefully curated textbooks and TV debates? Could it be that revealing the full extent of Nehru’s flaws might destabilize not just Congress mythology—but the mythology of India’s founding altogether?
We are constantly told to “move on,” to “look forward,” to “not dig up the past.” Funny how that advice only applies to Congress scandals and not colonial rule, Aurangzeb, or Mughal invasions.
Here’s a thought: maybe history isn’t something you get to edit like a press release. Maybe it’s messy, uncomfortable, and full of inconvenient truths. And maybe—just maybe—we owe it to ourselves to read what one of the most influential backroom men of independent India had to say, no matter how scandalous it sounds to our delicate, state-curated ears.
Mathai himself put it plainly: “Before I started writing this book, I suspended from my mind all personal loyalties of a conventional nature; only my obligation to history remained.”
Imagine that—an obligation to history. Not dynasty. Not political convenience. Not legacy preservation. History.
What a radical concept.
So, here’s a message to the government: stop pretending to be the torchbearers of truth while hiding behind the Congress party’s old, moth-eaten censorship blankets. If the people of this country can handle reality TV, they can handle the reality of their political icons.
Unban Reminiscences of the Nehru Age. Publish the redacted chapters. Digitize the whole thing and slap it on the Parliament library homepage. Let Nehru’s halo be tested by fire. Let history do what it’s meant to do—breathe.
And if the chips fall where you don’t want them to, so be it.
Truth, unlike legacy, doesn’t need protection.
