The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : After diaries, Nijalingappa’s correspondence is untraceable

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Wednesday, Dec 10, 2008
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After diaries, Nijalingappa’s correspondence is untraceable

K.N. Venkatasubba Rao

Nijalingappa had kept his letters in a gunny bag

S. Nijalingappa

Bangalore: Even as the reported disappearance of some of the diaries of former Chief Minister (late) S. Nijalingappa has been shrouded in mystery for over five years, some of Mr. Nijalingappa’s letters to national leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhai Patel and K. Kamaraj are also untraceable, according to former Union Minister M.V. Rajasekharan.

Mr. Rajasekharan told The Hindu that Mr. Nijalingappa (who was his father-in-law) had preserved all his correspondence in a gunny bag.

A person who identified himself as a research student from north Karnataka region met Mr. Nijalingappa at his Chitradurga residence and asked him for some of his personal papers for research purposes.

The ailing leader handed over the gunny bag containing all his correspondence and other papers to that person on the promise that all the correspondence should be returned intact to him or his family.

However, the person who took away the records could not be traced, Mr. Rajasekharan said.

Emphasising the importance of such correspondence, Mr. Rajasekharan said that he would make an appeal to those concerned to return the correspondence in the national interest.

Diaries

On the reported disappearance of the diaries, he said that an official from the Delhi-based Teenmurti Library and Sardar Patel Society had collected a handful of diaries from Mr. Nijalingappa in his presence in the middle of the 1990s. He is given to understand that some of his father-in-law’s diaries are said to be with the State Department of Archives. The State-based S. Nijalingappa Centenary Celebration Committee, headed by R.V. Deshapande, had published the original and Kannada translation versions of the diary in 2003.

K.R. Kamalesh, who edited the published versions of the diaries, said that he had gone through the diaries maintained from 1950 to 1999. The diaries were written in English. He had edited the contents of the diaries beginning from 1950 to 1978. However, he had found that the volumes from 1962 to 1967 were not in the set provided to him.

In 2003, the then Janata Dal legislator P.G.R. Sindhia had in a letter, drawn the Government’s attention to the “disappearance” of some of the “politically sensitive” diaries of Mr. Nijalingappa.

In response, the then Minister of State for Kannada and Culture, Rani Satish said: “The disappearance of the diaries of S. Nijalingappa is far from the truth... On the request of the archives, the Delhi-based Sardar Patel Society had been given the 1982, 1983 and 1984 diaries. The archives has microfilm copies of the diaries it received from the Sardar Patel Society. The photocopies of the said diaries were taken from the microfilm. Its contents were published in an abridged form in the commemorative volume, Rashtra Bhushana, released on the occasion of Mr. Nijalingappa’s birth centenary recently. An exhibition of the photocopies of the said diaries was also organised on that occasion. Barring these diaries, the archives is not in possession of any other diary of Nijalingappa.”

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