Shreya Varanasi, Pune
A day before Indian Independence Day, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library was officially renamed the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library Society. On Wednesday, Jairam Ramesh, the senior leader of the Congress party, took to social media and slammed the decision. He called out the Centre for “denying, distorting, defaming, and destroying Nehru and the Nehruvian legacy.” Meanwhile, the BJP has defended the move, saying that the new name gave respect to all the Prime Ministers of India.
In his social media post, he wrote, “Mr. Modi possesses a huge bundle of fears, complexes, and insecurities, especially when it is about our first and longest-serving Prime Minister. 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.” He further said that “despite such assault, Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy will live on” and “inspire generations to come.”
Congress MP Manickam Tagore also accused PM Modi and the central government of trying to erase Pandit Nehru’s legacy and said, “This shows the pettiness of PM Modi. Pandit Nehru lives in the people’s hearts he loved across India.” In support of Congress, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut also slammed the renaming of the museum. Sanjay said that while they can change the institution’s name, they cannot change Pandit Nehru’s name in History. He slammed the BJP and said, “You can’t create a history like them, so you are changing names.”
Meanwhile, BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad hit back at Congress as he reacted to the controversy surrounding the name change. Prasad told ANI in an interaction, “They [Congress] think that only Nehru ji and his family matter. Narendra Modi gave a respectful position to all the PMs of India at the museum.”
The Nehru Memorial Museum, now the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library Society, was founded in 1964 in memory of India’s first Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. In a meeting of the NMML Society, presided over by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, the renaming was decided.