Our criticisms are not meant to detract from the valuable role the NMML plays in academic and intellectual life.
There are many ways in which it continues to embody fine traditions and norms.
All those who work there deserve credit for this. However, we are concerned about whether it is performing according to its past standards and pursuing its potential. The current practices may well lead the NMML into decline.
We have written this note in a responsible spirit and with respect. When a set of policies and decisions conflict with the core mission of an institution, it is time to think of a course correction. In our view an unfortunate administrative style and misguided decisions have been embarked upon that will corrode the NMML’s strengths. Scholars, academics and citizens interested in the pursuit of knowledge have to try and rescue this internationally reputed institution. This is a task that we owe ourselves and future generations of researchers who have (and will) benefit from its fine services; it is also something we owe the great Indian intellectual and democrat after whom this institution was named and whom it was meant to honour. *
Dr Karan Singh was a former maharaja of Kashmir, who was now a senior Congress politician. The other members of his executive council included a journalist close to the Congress party, a newspaper proprietor close to the Congress party, and a bureaucrat close to the Congress party. None had any pretentions to scholarship, or any real knowledge of the activities, past and present, of the NMML. All knew, however, that the present director of the NMML was the personal choice of the current president of the Congress party.
The letter by the former Fellows was met with a brief, noncommittal answer. Dr Karan Singh was gracious enough to meet with some of its signatories. However, he showed little interest in what they had to say about the functioning of the NMML. The only concrete outcome of the meeting was a further humiliation of Dr Balakrishnan. Apparently, the director or the chairman of the executive council, or both, had come to the erroneous conclusion that the deputy director had instigated the note by the Fellows. So, in April 2009, Dr Balakrishnan was suspended from his post, and proceedings initiated aimed at his dismissal from service.
VI
The suspension of a central government officer is extremely rare in India. It occurs only when there is clear evidence of continuous and large-scale nepotism and corruption. This, however, was a vicious act of vengefulness; initiated by an insecure director, and carried out by a chairman whose attitude and actions betrayed the feudal background to which he owed allegiance. Dr Balakrishnan, from this perspective, was a rebellious and insubordinate serf, who had to be shown his place.
In May 2009, a month after Dr
Balakrishnan was suspended, the Congress-led UPA won the General Elections. Manmohan Singh was sworn in for a second term as prime minister. This time, he chose to keep the culture portfolio for himself. This encouraged the group of scholars who wished to stem and if possible reverse the decline of the NMML; perhaps, as a scholar himself, the prime minister would see fit to support their efforts. The present director’s term was to end in August; perhaps next time a capable successor could be chosen through an open and transparent process. The seven former Fellows who had originally written to Dr Karan Singh now solicited the support of other historians and social scientists who had worked in or been shaped by the NMML. The response was overwhelming. A letter to the prime minister/minister of culture was drafted and endorsed by fifty-seven scholars of distinction, young and old, living in India and abroad. The signatories included Rajmohan Gandhi, Veena Das, Sunil Khilnani, Tapati Guha Thakurta, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Nayanjot Lahiri, Sumit Sarkar, Krishna Kumar, Partha Chatterjee, Sugata Bose, Srinath Raghavan, Joya Chatterji, Mushirul Hasan, Gyanendra Pandey, Nivedita Menon, Shahid Amin, A.R. Venkatachalapathy and Zoya Hasan. Never before had such a glittering array of (normally individualistic) scholars put their collective seal on a public activity. This was merely a reflection of what the NMML had once meant to the intellectual life of the nation. The operative paragraphs of their letter follow:
Sir, in your dual capacity as Prime Minister and Minister of Culture, we urge you to recognize that as the repository of our modern history the NMML is absolutely unique. The NMML
contains within its walls the histories and memories of the very many remarkable people who made India a nation-state and who helped nurture it as a democracy.
Some of these patriots are famous; others obscure. They came from all parts of the country and from a variety of social backgrounds. They owed allegiance to a wide variety of beliefs and ideologies. In giving all these trends a home, the NMML is a microcosm of India itself. In this sense the NMML is absolutely irreplaceable. If a private firm like Satyam collapses there are other private firms that shall take its place. If a once great college like Presidency in Kolkata or St. Stephen’s in Delhi declines, other colleges will continue to provide quality education. If one political leader fails to honour his or her mandate, the voter or citizen can elect another in his or her stead.
But there is no possible
substitute for the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Its decline is visible for all to see; its destruction will be a national calamity. We now ask you to immediately set in motion the steps necessary to save the NMML from becoming a failed institution. To revive the NMML, and to set in motion the process by which it can be restored to its former place of pre-eminence in the intellectual life of India, the Ministry needs to do the following things: First, restore the morale of the dedicated and experienced staff by ending the tenure of all consultants, and by revoking the suspension of the Deputy Director;
Second, induct into the
Executive Council (EC) three or more distinguished scholars. According to the bye-laws of the NMML, the EC must have an adequate representation from academics and scholars. However, at present the EC has only one scholar—this is Shri B.R. Nanda, whose advanced age (he is over ninety) and indifferent health has made it impossible for him to actively participate in the EC. The other members of the NMML EC are all from outside the academic community. Clearly, the absence of scholarly expertise in the body charged with supervision has contributed to the inability to stem the decline of the institution; Third, once the present
Director’s term ends in August, her successor must be chosen through an open, transparent process. As with Directors of IIMs and IITs, the Director of the NMML should be chosen by a committee of acknowledged experts. This selection committee should consist of historians, sociologists or political scientists of national and international renown, and who are known to be utterly non-partisan. Applications for the post of Director, NMML, should be solicited through advertisements placed in leading academic journals in India and abroad.
The selection committee can then short-list and interview candidates before choosing, through this rigorous process, the best person for the job; Fourth, once a new Director takes office, he or she must be encouraged by the reconstituted EC to reach out once more to the scholarly community as a whole, thus to restore the NMML’s non-partisan and plural character. *
The scholars who signed this letter sometimes expressed their sentiments in anguished personal communications to this writer. ‘I know how important an institution the Nehru Memorial [Museum and] Library is,’ wrote a senior art historian from Calcutta, ‘and I’m distressed to hear of the kind of things happening there now. It is such a struggle to keep the life and dynamism of institutions going, especially as one generation of scholars and directors go away, and our generation must take over.’ A sociologist and novelist based in Delhi, who is an exact contemporary of mine, and who had likewise been shaped and formed at every step by the institution, wrote that the
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library has been a meeting ground for scholars for decades now. The Library was always the best kept, and the silence and the new books always meant that research was a priority for the staff, the fellows and the guests. The dichotomy between staff and fellows was always an artificial
one, for the Director and the Deputy Director were meant to bridge this in their different ways. While Mridulaji is an old friend, I must admit that the polarity between staff and scholars (visiting the library or as fellows) is now very large. There is a great deal of discontentment since the staff is not given their due. The archives have been maintained for these many decades because of the commitment of the staff. The staff is the spine of the institution. They must be encouraged to speak their mind to the Board and to the Director, without fear of reprisal.
Dr Balakrishnan and his team have devoted their lives to the NMML. They had the total support of previous directors, and we as scholars from all over the country benefitted from that teamwork. Staff is permanent, directors rotate. The staff must feel that their work in keeping up the archives and library and resource materials of the NMML
is acknowledged. The success of the institution, as museum, library and archives depends on the osmosis created between them. It is first of all a library and research archive, since the Museum houses these as a Trust to [Nehru’s] contribution to the National Movement. Democracy rather than oligarchy must be its primary emphases.
Meanwhile, a very distinguished historian and founding member of Subaltern Studies said:
I feel really sad about the goings at NMML. I first began work there in 1972, when the library was in the old building, and seminars were held in a hall on the first floor. Dr Balakrishnan, and a clutch of senior lady administrators, librarians and manuscript handlers at the Teen Murti have all earned our respect. We must surely protest, and perhaps widen our intervention (at a later stage) by pointing out (as politely as possible) that the G[overnment] O[f] I[ndia] has not thought fit to have a single practising scholar on the Board of Teen Murti.
And another remarked:
Dr Balakrishnan has been a huge support to scholars, particularly during the interregnum when the new Director had not been appointed for a considerable period. What is equally or perhaps more worrying is the way in which the current dispensation has operated there.
This will, in the long run, leave precedents to be followed without any resistance for the worse kind of nepotism/oppression from the political class if not resisted at this juncture.
A British scholar wrote about how he
vividly remember[ed] how awed I was by the NMML collections when I first visited there as a young scholar in the late 1980s and I owe a personal debt to Professor Ravinder Kumar (without whom I would never have been able to gain access to the MP State Archives in Bhopal, where I worked for a whole year in the early 90s). The NMML was always the best place to find the latest publications on the history, sociology or politics of any part of India. The collections were in fine condition and the NMML seminar programme used to be a lively centre for academic debate. Sadly, the NMML is now a poor reflection of this past excellence. The facilities for fellows are much deteriorated, the seminar programme is I understand entirely extinct, and it is a struggle to make use of the library’s microfilm collection, with the limited and out of date equipment available and the weary and demoralized attitude of staff.
VII
The letter sent by the scholars to Dr Manmohan Singh was forwarded to the director of the NMML, who immediately—and naturally—canvassed her own supporters. These wrote in to the prime minister and the Congress president, saying that the criticisms of the institution’s current functioning were personally and politically motivated. One letter accused the signatories to the memorandum of being ‘self-professedly exclusivist and loyally wedded to the Euro-American pedagogic grid while remaining tactfully divorced from the Indian contexts upon which it feeds incessantly for the fame and glory it keeps garnering globally’. A second dismissed it as the handiwork of
‘bureaucratic pin pricks and jealous people’. A third, written by a certain Arjun Dev, claimed that the memorandum sent by the fifty-seven scholars ‘gives the impression that it was drafted to be addressed to the new government that the signatories thought would be formed in May under a new dispensation. That, unfortunately for them, did not happen. If it had, the Memorandum on this count at least would have won them great laurels and the new dispensation would have taken immediate steps to get rid of the malaise along with much else, if not the whole lot.’
The election of May 2009 had pitted the United Progressive Alliance, which was led by the Congress party, against the National Democratic Alliance, whose major constituent was the Bharatiya Janata Party. The incredible charge that the signatories to the letter to the prime minister—Rajmohan Gandhi, Sunil Khilnani, Nayanjot Lahiri, Partha Chatterjee, Neera Chandhoke, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Nivedita Menon et al.—were closet or open supporters of the BJP was sought to be proven by a targeted reference to me personally. Thus Mr Dev wrote:
The ‘pluralism and
ecumenism’ of at least one of the signatories who appears to be the driving force, the representative of the ‘representatives of the scholarly community’, of the campaign against the NMML and its present Director perhaps needs some looking into. Shri Ramachandra Guha … [i]n his book, India After Gandhi [Picador, 2007] … deals with the killings of Sikhs in the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi.
Following his version of ‘pluralism and ecumenism’
… he concludes that the mobs ‘were led and directed by
Congress politicians: metropolitan councilors, members of Parliament, even Union Ministers’. [P. 571] This is followed by a reference to the ‘deeply insensitive’ comment of Rajiv Gandhi. Later, he compares Rajiv Gandhi to Narendra Modi. He writes, ‘In both cases the pogroms were made possible by the willed breakdown of the rule of law. The Prime Minister in Delhi in 1984, and the Chief Minister in Gujarat in 2002, issued graceless statements that in effect justified the killings.’ [P. 657]
In Shri Guha’s view, Modi was guilty of issuing only
‘graceless statements’; he was no more responsible for the Gujarat massacre than Rajiv Gandhi was for the killings in Delhi. Further, he writes, ‘The final similarity is the most telling, as well as perhaps the most depressing. Both parties, and leaders, reaped electoral rewards from the violence they had legitimized and overseen’. [pp.
657–58] Rajiv Gandhi is thus accused of having not only legitimized the violence [by his graceless statement] but ‘overseen’ it, meaning ‘supervising’ it. Even the worst critics of Rajiv Gandhi have never made this accusation …
This letter was also copied to Sonia Gandhi. The parallels between the pogroms against the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 were marked—I would stand by every word I wrote on this subject in my book. But the twist, or spin, put by Mr Dev on my analysis was: ‘This man is equating Rajiv Gandhi with Narendra Modi.’ If there was one politician Sonia Gandhi detested, it was Mr Modi. As it happens, I don’t particularly care for Mr Modi either, but this did not mean I would necessarily excuse or be an apologist for comparable crimes committed by other parties or politicians. In my book I had done what I thought was the historian’s duty, but this had now come back to haunt, and possibly doom, the campaign to save the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. *
In the end, Professor Mukherjee was granted an extension of two years. A senior official in the prime minister’s office I spoke to said that the PM recognized the intellectual force of our argument—the mistake we had apparently made was to mention the portraits of the Congress prime ministers in the foyer and the fact that the NMML had been home to Youth Congress meetings. This permitted the director and her supporters to—pace Mr Dev—represent us as somehow being against the interests of the Congress party (and its First Family). Members of Parliament who were office-bearers of the Youth Congress had also met the prime minister to press the director’s case. Meanwhile, as with the controversial selection of Pratibha Patil as the President of India, criticisms of one of her appointees made Sonia Gandhi even more determined to protect her protégé. The Congress party, and its president
especially, valued loyalty and
length of service above all other virtues and characteristics. In India in general, and in this regime in particular, loyalty would take precedence over scholarship and institution-building, any time.
Soon after the director of the NMML had been granted a new term, the institution announced that it would hold a month-long celebration ‘to commemorate the 120th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru’. A festival of films, inaugurated by the Congress chief minister of Delhi, purported to show how ‘Bombay cinema took Nehru’s vision of secularism to the masses and popularized it’. A seminar on Nehru’s impact on Indian architecture was organized, where one speaker claimed that ‘Jawaharlal Nehru wanted the buildings to reflect what he stood for … He was probably the last “ruler” in Delhi who has had a great impact on the architecture of his times and his city since Shahjahan.’ Other seminars celebrated the ‘Nehru Imprint’ on music, drama, and education. Meanwhile, a children’s fair was held to show young Indians how ‘to make friends with Chacha Nehru in the twenty-first century’. The publicity material for this event noted that ‘Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the first prime minister of India who had contributed much towards its freedom …
Patriots and Partisans: From Nehru to Hindutva and Beyond Page 30