New Delhi: Fifty-one cartons of letters written by India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to noted personalities, including Lord Mountbatten's wife Edwina, Jayaprakash Narayan and others have allegedly been 'censored' from the Prime Minister's Museum and Library (formerly the Nehru Museum and Library).
The matter came to the fore when the Prime Minister's Museum and Library (PMML) recently wrote to Congress MP and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi to return the collection of historical letters belonging to Nehru. According to sources, these letters were removed from public access in 2008 at the request of Sonia Gandhi, who was the then chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). The papers have since been stored privately.
BJP IT department head Amit Malviya took to social media and mentioned, "In a recent annual general meeting of the PMML, a member, Rizwan Kadri, wrote to the Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, urging him to help retrieve these letters from his mother, Sonia Gandhi."
Malviya further raised questions about the intention of Sonia Gandhi to keep the letters and documents with her. "What I find particularly intriguing is: what might Nehru ji have written to Edwina Mountbatten that warranted such censorship? And will Rahul Gandhi act to recover these letters?" tweeted Malviya.
BJP MP Sambit Patra has also smelled a rat behind the 'censoring' of the documents by Sonia Gandhi. "We are quite amazed about the conversation that must have taken place between Edwina Mountbatten and Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan with the former Prime Minister that so much effort is being made to hide it," Patra said.
Reports suggest that the collection comprising 51 boxes containing personal correspondences of Nehru with some of the 20th century's most prominent figures, was transferred to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in 1971 by the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund. It includes letters to Albert Einstein, Jayaprakash Narayan, Edwina Mountbatten, Padmaja Naidu, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Aruna Asaf Ali and Babu Jagjivan Ram among others.
In this context, Rizwan Kadri, historian and author and a member of PMML society had shot a letter to Sonia Gandhi in September this year requesting her to either return the documents to the institution for digitisation or grant permission to scan those or provide scanned copies, which would facilitate research by scholars.
The PMML member this time wrote to Rahul Gandhi reiterating to return the collection of documents. "We understand that these documents may hold personal significance for the Nehru family. However, the PMML believes that making these historical materials, more widely accessible would greatly benefit scholars and researchers," the PMML letter reads.
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