Prime Ministers Museum and Library to legally pursue Sonia Gandhi for return of Nehru papers

Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a group photo at the 47th Annual General Meeting of the Prime Ministers' Museum and Library Society, in New Delhi on Monday. (PMO via PTI photo)

Members of the Prime Ministers Museum and Library (PMML) Society have arrived at a consensus to legally pursue the matter of Congress MP Sonia Gandhi taking away boxes of papers from Jawaharlal Nehru’s private collection in 2008. The decision was arrived at during the annual general meeting of the society chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Teen Murti Bhavan in New Delhi on Monday, reported The Indian Express.

A broad consensus emerged that the papers pertaining to the first Prime Minister are a “national treasure and should be handed back to the museum as its rightful place to preserve his legacy”, the paper reported citing sources.

Congress leader Sonia Gandhi had reclaimed 51 boxes of papers from Jawaharlal Nehru’s private collection that were donated by the Gandhi family, and also barred access to several sets of these papers in 2008, when the UPA government was at the Centre and the PMML Society (then the Nehru Memorial or NMML) was helmed by an appointee of the Nehru-Gandhi family.

The issue was discussed at length during the previous AGM held in February 2024 when a view to seek legal opinion on the matter was agreed to. The issue came up for discussion again during the meeting Monday.

Following the legal opinion sought after the last AGM, the PMML administration wrote to Sonia Gandhi's office earlier this year and sought the return of the papers for scholars and historians, marking the first time that the museum administration put on record Sonia Gandhi taking away part of the papers from the Nehru collection, which they had donated to the museum decades ago.

The IE report cited sources as saying that the legal pursuit of the matter was discussed at the meeting since no response was received from Gandhi's office. The members contended that papers once donated or gifted cannot be taken back, and hence remain the organisation’s property and should be handed back to its custody.

The Nehru papers were donated after 1971 by Indira Gandhi and later by Sonia Gandhi, after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. According to PMML records, the papers reclaimed by Sonia Gandhi in 2008 include letters exchanged between Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan, Edwina Mountbatten, Albert Einstein, Aruna Asaf Ali, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Babu Jagjivan Ram.

Recent years have seen several members of the Society demanding that the letters exchanged between Nehru and Edwina be taken back from Sonia Gandhi’s custody, and that a “forensic audit” of the rest of the lot be conducted to ensure that important papers are not missing.

Chaired by the Prime Minister, the 47th AGM of the PMML Society was attended by Union Ministers Rajnath Singh (vice-president), Nirmala Sitharaman, Dharmendra Pradhan, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Chairman Nripendra Mishra, and members including BJP leader Smriti Irani, adman-lyricist Prasoon Joshi, and PMML’s new Director Ashwani Lohani.