What would Jawaharlal Nehru have thought of an event at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) that recognised and felicitated cow vigilantes? Systematically, over the last four years, the Modi Government has dismantled NMML as an important centre of scholarship and historical research. While Nehru remains the only Prime Minister, besides Indira Gandhi, to have participated in the freedom struggle, the Modi government has sought to ‘democratise’ NMML by embarking on a ‘Museum of Prime Ministers’ at Teenmurti. And while one of the BJP appointees, Swapan Dasgupta, put up a note that NMML should be more about research and less about ‘commemoration’, the institution under the Ministry of Culture is bent more on commemoration than serious scholarship and research.

Since 2014, the BJP-led government, through its Ministry of Culture, has been running NMML with a single purpose: how to undermine Nehru from the Museum and Library established in his memory and dedicated to research and scholarly work around him and his concerns.

Nehru’s memory has been attacked in two ways. First, the authorities went about removing visible signs of Nehru from Teenmurti, the NMML campus. One of the first acts of the new management was to remove the photograph of Nehru and replace it with a photograph of RSS ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyay.

The large canvas picture of Nehru’s final journey adorning the walls opposite the auditorium too was then removed. Then NMML served an eviction notice (stayed by the court) to the Nehru Memorial Fund, which, apart from governing the Nehru Fellowships, was also bringing out the selected works of Nehru.

At a more substantial level, NMML has deliberately not organised anything directly related to Nehru on any of the important days connected to the first Prime Minister. On the other hand, the other foundational principle of NMML, the national movement, has given way to strategic and geo–security studies, work already being done by a host of lobbying organisations like the India Foundation run by Ram Madhav, whereas the present Director of NMML, Shakti Sinha, was presumably engaged in similar work.