Nothing could be more ironical than the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government fighting over the secularist legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru institutionalised in the form of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in the heart of New Delhi. And nothing could be more insulting to the memory of Nehru than the sordid slugfest between the BJP and the Congress over the appointment of Mahesh Rangarajan as the director of the NMML. Dr. Rangarajan, a respected scholar and academic, was eventually forced to tender his resignation after an unseemly controversy over irregularities in the process of his appointment. The NMML is a tribute to independent India’s first Prime Minister, his vision and dreams for the country; it was intended to inspire generations of people who walk in to get glimpses of the making of a nation. Despite assurances from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to revere the memory of Nehru, it is now quite apparent that members of his Cabinet, who draw their strength and inspiration from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, are not willing to let the Museum be. Murmurs about changing the basic structure of the Museum to make it “more contemporary” have slowly gained ground. And while Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma might have scored a legal point by highlighting the irregularities in Dr. Rangarajan’s appointment as director, it is no secret that the government wants a more pliable person to head the NMML.
The proposal to turn the NMML into a memorial for governance not only smacks of political petty-mindedness, but also undermines the very purpose such memorials were meant to serve, as repositories of history. Indeed, the battle over the institution seems but only a small part of a larger project of the ruling establishment to challenge received historiography and erase collective memories. The significance of the controversy over the appointment of the NMML director thus goes beyond personalities, and touches on the future of public institutions and the dangers of officially sanctioned manipulation of historiography. Questions will be asked of the UPA too, as to why the previous government demonstrated such a tearing hurry to appoint Dr. Rangarajan. Clearly, the party thinks of the Memorial as its fiefdom and thought nothing of rushing through the appointment process just before the country went into election mode. While the attempt to provide institutional stability to the Memorial is understandable, due process could have been followed and Dr. Rangarajan spared the embarrassment of having to battle a new government on the propriety of his appointment. At the very least, the Congress could have protected the integrity of an individual whose tenure it had sought to retain in perpetuity. Going by the yardstick being applied to the Nehru Memorial Museum, why not turn Gandhi Smriti too into a memorial for all the nationalists who were Gandhi’s contemporaries, and make it representative of their collective vision? Surely, to do so would be to knock all meaning and symbolism out of such institutions, and reduce them to their functional use as bricks-and-mortar buildings that could house anything and everything.
