Congress says Nehru Museum renamed to destroy legacy of country’s first prime minister

The Congress on Wednesday criticised the Central government’s decision to rename the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi, saying that its objective is to destroy the legacy of the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi has been officially renamed as Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library Society. The decision to do so was taken in June during a meeting of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Society.

In 2019, the society had been reconstituted by removing Congress leaders Mallikarjun Kharge, Jairam Ramesh and Karan Singh as members.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was made the chairperson of the society and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh its vice president. Other Bharatiya Janata Party leaders such as Nirmala Sitharaman, Ramesh Pokhriyal, Prakash Javadekar, V Muraleedharan and Prahlad Singh Patel were also inducted into the society as members.

On Wednesday, Congress General Secretary (Communication) Jairam Ramesh accused Modi of being behind the change.

“Mr Modi possesses a huge bundle of fears, complexes and insecurities, especially when it comes to our first and longest-serving prime minister,” Ramesh wrote on X, previously known as Twitter. “He has had a single-point agenda of denying, distorting, defaming and destroying Nehru and the Nehruvian legacy. He has erased ‘N’ and put ‘P’ instead. That P is really for pettiness and peeve.”

Ramesh added that despite the “relentless assault on Nehru”, his legacy would live for the world to see and would continue to inspire generations.

“He [Modi] can never take away Nehru’s gigantic contributions to the freedom movement and his towering achievements in building the democratic, secular, scientific and liberal foundations of the Indian nation-state, all of which are now under assault by Mr Modi and his drumbeaters,” Ramesh said.

The BJP, however, defended the decision saying that the museum would showcase the achievements of all the prime ministers of the country.

“When a museum, a library which would showcase the achievements of all the prime ministers of this country, from the first prime minister to the current prime minister, from Lal Bahadur Shashtri to PV Narasimha Rao to HD Devegowda to Inder Kumar Gujral – all of them have made this country great –, the Congress party is opposing and saying it should be named after only one Prime Minister from one family,” BJP spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla said.