“Historical heritage not property of any family”: BJP MP Sambit Patra on collection of letters by Jawaharlal Nehru

New Delhi [India], December 16 (ANI): The issue of the Prime Minister’s library and museum member writing to the leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi requesting him to give back the documents, that were withdrawn from the museum allegedly on the order of Congress senior leader Sonia Gandhi, has snowballed into a controversy.

Bharatiya Janata Party MP Sambit Patra took on the Congress and said that the collection of letters written by Jawaharlal Nehru were a historical heritage and not the property of any family.

“This is a historical heritage (collection of letters written by Jawaharlal Nehru), not the property of any family… The country wants to know what was in the correspondence between Jawaharlal Nehru and Lady Mountbatten and Jagjivan Ram and Jayaprakash Narayan?… What was there in these letters that the first family felt it should not be made public?… We demand that the collection of letters written by Jawaharlal Nehru should be returned…” Patra said addressing the media.

Rizwan Kadri, a member of the Prime Minister’s Museum and Library (PMML) Society wrote a letter to the Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi requesting to give back the documents, that he called are “important aspect of its history” and were withdrawn from the museum allegedly on the order of Congress senior leader Sonia Gandhi.

“In September 2024, I wrote a letter to Sonia Gandhi requesting that the 51 cartons from approximately eight different sections, which were part of the Nehru collections at the Prime Ministers’ Museum (formerly the Nehru Memorial), be either returned to the institution, or we be granted permission to scan them, or provided with their scanned copies. This would allow us to study them and facilitate research by various scholars,” he said.”

These include important correspondences between Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru and Lady Mountbatten, as well as letters exchanged with Pt. Govind Ballabh Pant, Jayaprakash Narayan, and others. These letters are a significant part of Indian history and have been proven through records to have been withdrawn from the museum in 2008 at Sonia Gandhi’s direction,” Rizwan Kadri added.