The wedge between the Congress and the Union government, evident on the 125th birth anniversary of the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on Friday, will be manifest again on Monday when two separate seminars on his legacy will open in Lutyens’ Delhi round about the same time.
While the Government-funded seminar at Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML) is open to all, the Congress has made a point of keeping the Modi government out of the international conference on “Nehru’s Worldview and his legacy – Democracy, Inclusion and Empowerment”.
Former Presidents of Afghanistan, Ghana, Nigeria – Hamid Karzai, John Kufuor and Olusegun Mathew Obasanjo respectively – arrived in the Capital on Sunday to attend the Congress seminar. The NMML seminar has a number of leading academics lined up. As per the schedules of the two seminars, only Sunil Khilnani, Director of India Institute at King’s College, London, will participate in both.
For many, like Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Aditya Mukherjee, the Congress decision was a reaction to the way the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself have spoken about the Nehruvian legacy in the past.
Prof. Mukherjee will present a paper on “Inclusive Democracy and People’s Empowerment’’ at the Congress seminar.
Lamenting the way the tug of war between the Congress and the Centre over the birth anniversary of Nehru was grabbing all the attention instead of the legacy a man who is a “national asset”, Prof. Mukherjee said the first salvo was fired by the Modi government.
“Referring to the contributions of the founding fathers of modern India and former premiers in his first Independence speech, Mr. Modi made no mention of Nehru while naming the others. His comments like “Patel should have been the first Prime Minister instead of Nehru” laid the ground for this tug of war. Then the government dropped Congress president Sonia Gandhi from the organising committee of the birth anniversary,’’ he pointed out.
