Historian seeks Rahul Gandhi's help in getting back Nehru documents

Ahmedabad: Historian Rizwan Kadri has requested Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to help the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library Society in getting back some important documents related to former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Those documents were removed from the library in 2008 at the behest of Congress leader Sonia Gandhi during the UPA rule, Kadri alleged.

The Ahmedabad-based historian is a member of the New Delhi-based Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library Society, which was known as the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in the past.

Talking to the reporters here on Monday, Kadri said he sent an email to Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, after a similar request to his mother and former Congress president Sonia Gandhi yielded no response.

“In 2008, 51 cartons which were part of the Nehru collection in the library were removed on the orders of Sonia Gandhi. These documents were originally part of a collection of Nehru papers, containing both official and personal correspondence of our former PM. These documents are now missing from that collection,” he claimed.

Kadri said that in September this year, he sent an email to Sonia Gandhi, requesting her to either return those documents to the library or give it permission to scan those original papers.

He claimed the documents which were removed from the library included letters exchanged between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, wife of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy to India.

Letters written to Nehru by India’s former home minister Govind Ballabh Pant and socialist stalwart Jayaprakash Narayan were also part of the collection, he said.

“When there was no response from Sonia Gandhi, I sent an email to Rahul Gandhi to help the library in getting back those very important documents. These letters are national treasures and our heritage. It must be available to scholars and researchers. We all must know what was there in the correspondence between those leaders,” said Kadri.

During the society’s annual general meeting held in February, Kadri said some members raised questions that how can someone just take these documents away when they have already been donated to the library and remained part of the collection for all these years.

According to Kadri, he had even seen a person destroying some papers using a shredder at the library in the past.

“Following that incident, we had demanded a forensic audit to be conducted to find out how pages were removed from files and destroyed, and what was the motive behind it. An internal inquiry committee was also formed by the administration to look into that matter,” he said.

“I am hopeful that the Gandhi family will honour my request. I am a researcher and my aim is to preserve history which is real and neutral. As a researcher, I always wanted to study the correspondence between Nehru and Lady Mountbatten. Since 2019, I have been demanding that this collection should be shared with researchers,” he said.