BJP asks Sonia to return Nehru's letters

New Delhi : The BJP on Monday asked former Congress president Sonia Gandhi to return the correspondences of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru with a host of personalities to the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library, saying the historical documents belonged to the country and were not anyone’s personal property.

BJP MP and spokesperson Sambit Patra cited reports of the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library’s (PMML) deliberations on the issue to note that Nehru’s correspondences with Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last British viceroy to India, and eminent leaders Jayaprakash Narayan and Jagjivan Ram lay with the erstwhile Nehru Museum and Library Society, which returned them to Sonia Gandhi in 2008.

The Nehru museum was expanded to include memorials to all prime minis-ters and renamed the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library after the BJP came to power at the Centre. Patra told reporters that 51 cartons of Nehru’s correspondences were given to Sonia Gandhi after approval of the museum’s then director.

Historian Rizwan Kadri has requested Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to help the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Li-brary 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 Li-brary in the past.

Kadri said he sent an email to Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul , after a similar request to his mother and former Congress president Sonia Gandhi yielded no re-sponse.

“In 2008, 51 cartons which were part of the Nehru collec-tion in the library were removed on the orders of Sonia Gandhi. These documents were originally part of a collec-tion 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 docu-ments to the library or give it permission to scan those orig-inal papers. He claimed the documents which were re-moved from the library included letters exchanged between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, wife of Lord Louis Mount-batten, the last British viceroy to India.