Jammu, Aug 16: Jammu and Kashmir Pradesh Congress Committee (JKPCC) leaders led by the party’s Working President Raman Bhalla on Wednesday held a strong protest here against the BJP government for officially renaming the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library as the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library Society, terming it as an act of “vengeance”.
Speaking on the occasion, Bhalla said that despite the “relentless assault”, Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy will live on for the world to see and he will continue to inspire generations to come. “PM Modi possesses a huge bundle of fears, complexes and insecurities, especially when it comes to 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, but he can never take away Nehru’s gigantic contributions to the freedom movement and his towering achievements in building the democratic, secular, scientific and liberal foundations of the Indian nation-state, all of which are now under assault,” he said.
The Congress leader said “It is petty to take away the name of the first Prime Minister who led the interim government, who was prime minister upon independence, who is so far the longest-serving prime minister. You could have continued calling it the Nehru Memorial Prime Ministers Museum and Library.
“As far as Nehru ji is concerned, he was independent India’s first PM and unlike Modi, he did not cry foul. The country was coming out of 200 years of British colonial rule; he got down straight away to building India and laid the foundation for IITs, AIIMS, IIMs, ISRO, institutions like that which have held us in good stead,” Bhalla said, adding that the institution functions as a central point for academics, researchers, students, and the general public seeking insights into India’s historical trajectory, its struggle for autonomy, and the process of nation-crafting.
Speaking on the occasion, in-charge district Jammu (urban), Yogesh Sawhney said that undermining Pandit Nehru by changing the memorial or library that had his name, shows nothing but their own insecurities. “History is created, it is never changed or converted,” he said, adding, “History was created by Indira (Gandhi) Ji when she ensured that Pakistan was divided into two and she ensured that Bangladesh was born. You can keep saying what you want but the reality is that you have done zilch to create history.”
