Why not make a Sangh/Modi museum? Why desecrate the Nehru memorial?
Jawaharlal Nehru has always been a bête noire of the Sangh Parivar. Nehru was not only an outstanding secularist, a freedom fighter, a thoughtful scholar and peerless prime minister, but also an innovative thinker. But his memory is an anathema to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and associated bodies, because he and Vallabhbhai Patel banned the RSS after Gandhi's assassination. The Sangh Parivar has long wanted to diminish, if not erase, Nehru's memory from public discourse. There is no doubt that the new round of National Council Of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks and the ICHR's (Indian Council of Historical Research) "improvements" of epic-based ancient history are all part of a not-very-subtle attempt to rewrite Indian history.
The Sangh has now decided to "recast" the Nehru Museum Memorial Library (NMML) and bring in the exaggerated exploits of Narendra Modi's victorious election campaign and other such motivated propaganda. A combination of Sangh hagiography and a sidelining of Nehruvian politics is to be the fate of the NMML, called Teen Murti by many scholars. Only the Sangh could seek to combine the still relevant Nehruvian tradition with sectarian Hindutva discourse. But a secular Nehru and a Hindutva-minded Modi are as different as chalk and cheese. So the weights in this combination would very systematically shift Indian history and politics in the direction of the RSS. Hindutva sarsanghchalaks like MS Golwalkar, KB Hedgewar (whose death anniversary was the date for International Yoga Day on June 21), in fact, developed Indian history as mythology and motivated politics.
This means that the secular and rationalist Nehru and his foreign policy framework of non-alignment will be marginalised, while the sectarian, pro-corporate and pro-West foreign policy of the Sangh will be highlighted.
There is a lot of buildings in Lutyens' Delhi. There are many building spaces. Why not make a Sangh/Modi museum there? Why desecrate the NMML? Because the takeover of Nehruvian ideology and policies must be complete. The legacy of Nehru, including secularism, the public sector, non-alignment, and a modern, enlightened civil discourse is abhorrent to the revanchist Sangh.
So it is not a "recast" of the NMML that is sought, but an effort to make the Nehruvian legacy an "outcast". That is the real motive. This legacy must be buried under the aggressive mythology of Hindutva so that new generations have a distorted and diminished memory of Nehru, and what he did and his legacy. Will this partisan, opportunist hijacking of the NMML be permitted or uncontested by secular, forward-looking citizens? That certainly would not be in the Nehruvian tradition, much less part of the secular, pluralist and non-conformist discourse that Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru contributed to along with other other stalwarts from the Congress, Left and other streams.
This struggle is critical to India's secular, pluralist democracy. Spain's civil war hero Dolores Ibarruri's call, "No Pasaran" (They shall not pass), which Nehru himself heard in those historic days, is relevant today in India, too.