New Delhi: Amid demands to make a collection of private papers belonging to former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru that were withdrawn from the erstwhile NMML widely accessible, Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat on Wednesday asked that leaving aside the “extremely personal letters”, why the correspondences of a prime minister should not come out before the country.
Nehru lived at Teen Murti Bhawan in central Delhi, which after his death was turned into the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), housing a rich collection of books and rare records.
The NMML Society, at its special meeting held in June 2023, resolved to change its name to Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library (PMML) Society.
A member of the PMML Society said last December that he asked Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to make widely accessible the collection of private papers belonging to Nehru, which were withdrawn from the NMML on the request of then UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi in 2008.
“If a country’s prime minister has written a letter to anyone, leaving aside the extremely personal letters, why shouldn’t it come out before the country,” Shekhawat told PTI Videos when asked about the issue.
Rizwan Kadri, who teaches history at a college in Ahmedabad, also wrote to Sonia Gandhi last September to allow physical or digital access to the private papers related to Nehru that are in her possession.
These papers contain records related to exchanges between Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan, Edwina Mountbatten and Albert Einstein, among other personalities, Kadri said.
The PMML is an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Culture.
During the interaction, Shekhawat, who’s the minister for culture and tourism, also asked about the charges leveled by AIMIM leader Assadudin Owaisi in Lok Sabha on March 10 that the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) needs to be “detoxified” for following “Hindutva” ideology.
Quashing the allegations, Shekhawat asserted that the Narendra Modi government is working on the philosophy of “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas” without giving privilege to any particular community.
Certain people or classes in the country had been “benefiting out of appeasement for 55 years”, he alleged.
The government is working for the last nearly 11 years with the mantra of “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas”, but certain privileged classes which benefitted (from appeasement) still “see such issues”, Shekhawat said.
The perspective of the world about India has changed due to the speed and scale of its development during the last 10 years under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Shekhawat said.
Shekhawat also highlighted the various initiatives undertaken by the tourism ministry to boost foreign tourist footfalls in India, including programs and financial assistance under the Assistance to Central Agencies for Tourism Infrastructure Development scheme.
The National Archives of India (NAI) is currently working on the world’s largest digitization programme, conserving over six lakh pages in a month and digitizing lakhs of them daily, Shekhawat said.
