Moving to avert a potential standoff, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi has assured the Prime Ministers’ Museum & Library (PMML) of her cooperation in its bid to obtain a trove of private papers of the country’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, The Indian Express has learnt.
Sources told this newspaper that this is the first time Gandhi has responded to a communication from PMML in the wake of allegations that a bulk of these papers, in 51 cartons, were reclaimed by her from the organisation in 2008, when it was known as Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML).
Gandhi has conveyed that “her staff will look into it”, sources said.
PMML, which is an autonomous institution under the Union Culture Ministry, and Gandhi’s office did not respond to requests for comment from The Indian Express.
PMML authorities had written to the Congress leader twice this year seeking access to these papers, as well as any other correspondence pertaining to Nehru that might be in her custody, for the benefit of scholars and historians.
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According to PMML records, these papers include letters exchanged between Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan, Edwina Mountbatten, Albert Einstein, Aruna Asaf Ali, Vijaya Laxmi Pandit and Jagjivan Ram.
The first letter, which was sent in January this year after the issue was flagged at the PMML Society’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in 2024, did not receive a response, sources said. The letter was sent after it was decided by members at the AGM, chaired by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, to seek legal opinion regarding return of the papers. It also marked the first time that the museum placed on record in an official communication that part of the papers from the Nehru collection were taken by Gandhi.
There was a view among members that the papers should be recalled, sources said, and a consensus was reached to seek legal opinion on issues such as “ownership, custodianship, copyright, and the use of these archival collections”, since the papers were first donated to the organisation by former prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1971.
The second letter was sent after a “strong consensus” emerged during a follow-up at the PMML Society’s AGM in New Delhi on June 23 this year, presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that the matter should be pursued and legal opinion taken, sources said.
Apart from the Prime Minister, the AGM of the PMML Society, the key decision-making body of the organisation, was attended by Union Ministers Rajnath Singh (vice-president), Nirmala Sitharaman, Dharmendra Pradhan and Ashwini Vaishnaw. The AGM was also attended by PMML’s chairman Nripendra Mishra, its new director Ashwani Lohani and other members such as BJP leader Smriti Irani and censor board chief Prasoon Joshi.
During the AGM, sources said, the consensus was that papers pertaining to the first prime minister are a “national treasure and should be handed back to the museum as its rightful place to preserve his legacy”. Many of the members contended that the papers, once donated or gifted, cannot be taken back and remain the organisation’s property, sources said.
It was also put forth at the AGM that the matter pertains to 2008 — during the Congress-led UPA regime — and the organisation now seeks to “course correct the administrative lacunae of the pre-2014 era” by seeking further legal opinion.
Incidentally, the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, a non-for-profit trust headed by Sonia Gandhi, which is run from the same Teen Murti campus in New Delhi as PMML, recently launched a digital Nehru archive. It offers a set of 100 volumes of ‘Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru’, totalling over 35,000 documents, free of cost for download.