The Congress is hoping to use the legacy of that one figure in the freedom movement that the BJP reviles — Jawaharlal Nehru — to take on the ruling party.
If the Congress had planned — when it headed the previous UPA government — to have a year-long commemoration to mark Nehru’s 125th birth anniversary later this year, it is now doing it at party level. It is now apparent, a Congress functionary said, that the new Modi government is not at all keen to honour India’s first Prime Minister.
Indeed, the BJP that has often trawled the Congress’s pantheon of heroes — the planned Rs. 200 crore statue of Sardar Patel in Gujarat being one — for inspiration has been consistently hostile to Nehru.
The Congress, party sources said, would use its countrywide network to organise programmes in the States, districts and in colleges across the country that would not just be commemorative in nature, but an effort to remind people — especially the young — of the legacy of Nehru, the country’s first Prime Minister, and use his ideas to battle the BJP’s world view.
On Sunday, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who heads the main committee for the party’s celebrations, set up an implementation committee under former Kerala Governor Sheila Dikshit — its other members are former Union Ministers Mukul Wasnik, Anand Sharma and Jairam Ramesh and director of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies Mohan Gopal.
“A Prime Minister who wants to rewrite history, whose visceral antipathy towards Nehru is well-known as he stood for inclusiveness, social justice, equity, secularism and pluralism — everything the BJP is opposed to. How can you expect such a Prime Minister to commemorate Nehru’s birth anniversary?” asked Mr. Sharma.
Meanwhile, the NMML, that was to play a key role in the celebrations with funds allocated for the modernisation of the Nehru Museum, the creation of a Nehru Heritage Portal, is organising academic activities through the year.
