The Lost Nehru Papers

The Prime Ministers Museum & Library, at a recent meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is president of PMML Society, resolved to initiate legal proceedings to recover the Nehru papers removed by Sonia Gandhi in 2008. PR Ramesh examines the legal and political storm over the private papers of India’s first prime minister and why they remain at the heart of a battle for legacy and control

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU’S DECISION IN 1948 to move his residence from 17 York Road (now Motilal Nehru Marg) to the 30-acre Teen Murti Bhavan premises, on the south side of the Viceroy’s Palace (today’s Rashtrapati Bhavan), was not really innocent. It was a force­ful statement of power and a self-coronation to the highest echelons of political prestige in independent India. By all accounts, the York Road residence was open to all, including mi­grants who set up tents on its grounds, with no security su­pervision. Much of the negotiation with the British for India’s independence was done there, and Nehru apparently refused to entertain police camping within.

Nehru also met Edwina Mountbatten, the last viceroy’s wife, with whom he eventually developed a deep emo­tional connection, in the more private and salubrious parts of its gardens. (He dispatched the frigate INS Trishul for Edwina Mountbatten’s burial at sea in 1960, as Pamela Hicks, her daughter, wrote in her book Daughter of Empire: Life as a Mountbatten). Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s residence was close by, as was the Birla property where the Mahatma lived. Yet Nehru, whose ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech to the Constituent Assembly on the midnight of August 15, 1947 had resonated with every Indian, was presumably not content to remain one among equals any longer.

The elegant building, known as Flagstaff House and home to the Commander of the British Indian Army, was an ideal ad­dress for the prime minister to have. The Bhavan was built by Robert Tor Russell, a distinguished British soldier and architect who also designed Delhi’s Connaught Place and the Pataudi Pal­ace in 1930. It sported the statues of soldiers from three Indian regiments who fought alongside the British in World War I.

Nehru continued to live at Teen Murti Bhavan for 16 years— some of them with close confidante. Padmaja Naidu, daughter of Nehru’s fellow freedom fighter Sarojini Naidu, ensconced in the outhouse—until his death on May 27, 1964. For decades thereafter, Teen Murti Bhavan was etched into the collec­tive Indian consciousness as the residence of the first prime minister. The original proposal was to make this the permanent official residence for all future prime ministers, but President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Education Minister MC Chagla, and I&B Minister Indira Gandhi decided to convert this into a museum and memorial solely for Nehru, forming an independent body under the Ministry of Culture. A memorial library was inaugu­rated in 1974, apart from the museum. The library described itself as a “research and reference centre for colonial and postcolonial India.” It housed extensive archives, with a large collection of private papers of prominent Indians of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as oral histories.

Despite having converted Teen Murti Bhavan into a museum, the Union Cabinet, on August 9, 1968, decided that it should once again become the residence of the prime minister. The Nehru Me­morial Museum and Library (NMML) agreed to move to Patiala House, but it never happened. Lal Bahadur Shastri did not move in, clearly overwhelmed by the aggressive myth-making around Nehru by his admirers. Over the years, entry to the sanctified por­tals was restricted to ‘friendly’ researchers and academics, and access to Nehru’s papers was strictly monitored and vetted by the trustees and the Nehru-Gandhi family. The plan was not just to reign over prohibitively expensive real estate in the heart of the na­tional capital but to also build a resilient personality cult around Nehru, “the architect of modern India”, and, by extrapolation, the ‘First Family’ of Congress. Glowing scripted narratives were disseminated to be perpetuated through India’s future. And the plan seemed to succeed spectacularly. Until 2014.

51 Boxes of Stolen History

In 2014, after Narendra Modi won the General Election and threatened to demolish the grip of the Nehru-Gandhi family and its coterie on both power and prime property in New Delhi and across India, Sonia Gandhi resigned as chairperson of NMML, but not before having some 51 boxes of Nehru’s private correspondence carted away back in 2008. These included letters he had written to his father Motilal Nehru, mother Swarup Rani, wife Kamala Nehru, sisters Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Krishna Hutheesing, daughter Indira Gandhi, Edwina Mountbatten, PN Haksar, Albert Einstein, Jayaprakash Narayan, Babu Jagjivan Ram, and others. These were reportedly donated after 1971 by Indira Gandhi, while some other papers were later donated by Sonia Gandhi herself.

Successive attempts to retrieve the papers by communicating with both Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi also fell on deaf ears. For a family whose political clout has weakened substantially and which has not been in power in Delhi for over a decade now, though, there could be no greater apprehension than that the consistent myth-building around its patriarch, and related prominent prime ministers, could be busted for good. Not being able any longer to wield the power to control the narrative on the Nehru-Gandhi dy­nasty by durbari academics—that would be their worst nightmare, especially after the painstaking curation that went into it for almost eight decades, notwithstanding the first prime minister’s dubious distinction for curbing freedom of the press through the Constitu­tion (First Amendment) Act, 1951, which was the first amendment to the Constitution of India, and introduced significant changes, primarily related to freedom of speech and expression. The New York Times wrote on May 17, 1951, on the day the amendment Bill was brought in: “In the teeth of almost universal opposition in the country, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru strongly defended in Parliament the constitutional amendment bill seeking to impose severe restrictions on the freedom of speech and expression. He as­serted that the manner in which a certain section of the press had been indulging, day after day, in ‘vulgarity, indecency and falsehood’ had made it necessary to arm the authorities with powers to deal with such newspapers”. Indeed, it was a ruse to muzzle the media by asserting that Nehru was up in arms against a “moral problem” which had the potential to lead young Indians astray.

Behind the Halo

Again, there was proof, according to reports, in Nehru’s own letters, that facts were being manipulated and tweaked, and historical accuracy and integrity tampered with in order to invest Nehru with a halo of wisdom and statesmanship. In August 1946, and again in October that year, communal riots in Calcutta and Noakhali (in today’s Bangladesh) saw hundreds of Hindus killed and properties destroyed at the behest of the Muslim League. Mahatma Gandhi camped in Noakhali for four months, attempt­ing to restore communal harmony, and his inability to do so re­portedly left him wracked by self-doubt until his death in January 1948. Congress had by then agreed to Partition and efforts on the peace front were abandoned. Nehru was the interim prime min­ister. By late October 1946, communal riots had spread to Bihar, where, in retaliation for Noakhali, peasants across the province attacked Muslims—an episode the Muslim League promptly publicised to divert attention from Noakhali. Nehru reached Bi­har in early November 1946 to contain the riots, in what appeared to be an exercise to showcase to the world his firm commitment to secularism. At Gaya, he delivered a public speech in which he warned Hindu peasants at the forefront of the rioting against Muslims that if they did not stop, he would not refrain from considering stringent action against them—even bombing and airstrikes if necessary. That speech is mentioned in the book Hey Ram and in the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (Page 69, Volume 1, Series 2, published 1984). Encouraged by Nehru’s words, troops from the Madras Regiment opened fire on the peasant crowds, killing many on November 5, 1946, at Nagarnausa village, just 40km outside Patna.

Some estimates put the number of dead at 400, but Nehru him­self, in a letter to Padmaja Naidu, claimed that 40-50 were killed, although admitting that some 400 in all were injured. Many in Bihar believed that Nehru himself ordered the firing, and his let­ters—including that to Naidu where he expressed “relief” that the firing had stopped the rioting and called the death toll a “minor” price to pay for peace—seemed to more than suggest this. A 1989 reprint of the Selected Works reportedly also contained these let­ters. The letter to Naidu, which featured on Page 65 of Volume 1, Series 2 (1989), was absent from later editions, according to reports. In order to dispel the belief gaining ground that he had ordered the firing despite pushback from the state government, Nehru wrote a letter to the then Congress premier of Bihar, Shri Krishna Sinha, suggesting that he issue a statement to the contrary.

The letter, dated November 19, 1946, stressed: “I have received numerous letters saying the Bihar government had ordered the firing at my behest… I think you should issue a statement on my Bihar visit and the firing incident. I was told that the number of dead would not be more than 250. This number is not huge. As far as my visit is concerned, you say that I was visiting Bihar on your invitation and I did not interfere in your work or decisions in any manner. There is no connection between me and the fir­ing incident whatsoever.” But at Meerut on November 25, he said again that only 40-50 people had been shot dead. In his book Lokdev Nehru, poet and friend Ramdhari Singh Dinkar confirmed that the Army worked in Bihar under the strict monitoring of the prime minister himself and that enraged Hindu youths at a public meeting addressed by Nehru had torn his clothes and cap. That letter to Sinha, and what followed, was proof that Nehru himself might have been whitewashing the events at Nagarnausa to burnish his image as a fair and secular politician, and not a Hindu-hater.

Digging Deeper

The NMML, run with taxpayer money, was renamed by the Modi government as the Prime Min­isters Museum & Library (PMML) despite pushback from the Congress leadership which accused the new handlers of Delhi’s power levers of hatching a plan to ‘obliterate’ Nehru’s legacy. The hyperventi­lating, however, exposed the Congress leadership’s heightened anxiety about resigning itself to loss of power for over a decade and its prolonged living in denial. In 2018, the director of the institution, Shakti Sinha, had retorted to criticism on social media: “…Nehru presently occupies 20% space. No coverage post-1950. Photos have faded, negatives not kept. We are more than quadrupling Nehru’s cover­age, thematic and chronological. Making it interac­tive…” But it was not until August 15, 2023, that the nameplate of NMML changed formally to PMML.

Ironically, the Congress leadership’s victim card flies in the face of the fundamental reason the NMML was established. Clause 3(i)(d) of the MoA clearly states that one of the objects for which “The Nehru Memorial Museum & Library Society” was established was to “acquire, maintain & preserve papers of nationalist lead­ers of modern India & other eminent Indians who distinguished themselves in any field.” It was not meant solely to deify Nehru. A reappraisal of the vision and views of India’s first prime minister, and an equal acknowledgement of the contributions of all his successors, is overdue.

On June 24, the PMML administration took a decision at its 47th AGM chaired by Modi, as president of the PMML Society, that it would take legal action to retrieve the Nehru papers taken away by Sonia Gandhi in 2008, on the key contention that these were donated by Indira Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi herself to the mu­seum and were a critical repository of India’s history that would be necessary for all future research by scholars. By no consideration should such historically important papers be stored in the attic of someone’s residence.

The issue was earlier discussed in February 2024. Gujarat-based historian Rizwan Kadri, a member of the PMML Society, had writ­ten to Sonia Gandhi that it was “crucial that these records remain accessible to ensure a comprehensive understanding of our nation’s history.” Kadri later requested Rahul Gandhi to at least provide photocopies or digital copies. Neither replied. A formal letter was sent from the PMML to Sonia Gandhi this year, pointing out that the Nehru letters were crucial for scholars. The formal decision to resort to a legal process is proof that the government perceives a need for greater democratisation in the research of India’s post-Indepen­dence history as well as the contribution of all its prime ministers.

Although many of Nehru’s letters were private, including sev­eral to Edwina Mountbatten and Padmaja Naidu, declassifying them, even if only eight decades later, would allow historians to truthfully paint a rounded portrait of the first prime minister and the manner in which he shaped key historical events.

Arrogance of Entitlement

The Nehru-Gandhis are the only prominent political family to remain entrenched in Lutyens’ Delhi through the decades, mak­ing it that much easier to be present at the core of power and nurture a whole ecosystem cutting across spheres, to protect and propagate its interests. Despite being out of power for over a decade and per­forming worse with each election against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Modi, Congress’ First Family is unwilling to accept that things have changed, and irrevocably so, on the nation’s political landscape. In 2014, Congress won just 44 seats and garnered 19.31 per cent vote share compared to the 282 seats and 31 per cent vote share of BJP. In 2019, Congress did only marginally better, with 52 seats and 19.46 per cent vote share compared to BJP’s 303 seats and 37.30 per cent vote share. In 2024, despite giving it its best shot, Congress only managed 99 seats and 21.19 per cent of the vote share. Notwithstanding a lower tally in seats compared to 2019, BJP bested Congress’ performance by 141 seats (with a 36.56 per cent vote share), bringing its total to 240 seats. Congress and its allies took pride in the dip in BJP’s tally instead of upping their own and doing an honest intro­spection of the report card.

The Nehru-Gandhis were top-notch real estate barons in India, if one went solely by the properties they governed, exclusively accessed, and allowed restricted entry to all over the national capital through the years. In 2018, Arun Jaitley wrote on his blog: “Pandit Motilal Nehru gave up his law practice 98 years ago. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was a tall political leader who was never a practising lawyer, nor was Indira Gandhi ever involved in any professional or busi­ness activity. The late Rajiv Gandhi was an Indian Airlines pilot for a brief period and, thereafter, he was full-time into politics. On the basis of the available information, neither Sonia Gandhi nor Rahul Gandhi has ever worked for a living. For generations, the family did not earn from any commercial ventures. They were in public service. Most people in public life sacrifice their commercial careers and lead a frugal life. Most members of the Nehru-Gandhi family studied out­side the country for the last four generations. All have led more than a comfortable life. They enjoyed vacations at multiple domestic and international locations.” He maintained that “tenancies” were created in favour of persons, many of whom needed help when the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was in power, and thus capital was created. This capital was invested with “a real estate company under cloud and which entered into a sweetheart deal.”

Big Footprint on Coveted Land

Despite its diluted power, Congress’ First Family still continues to dominate the landscape of New Delhi. Just the family memorial ground accounts for 112.6 acres of land in the heart of the capital, including Shanti Van—Jawaharlal Nehru’s Samadhi—52.6 acres (2,12,865 sq m); Shakti Sthal—Indira Gan­dhi’s Samadhi—45 acres (1,82,109 sq m); and Vir Bhumi—Rajiv Gandhi’s Samadhi—15 acres (60,703 sq m). In addition, 10 Jan­path has become synonymous with Sonia Gandhi. This 15,181 sq m Type VIII building was allotted in 1991 to her for a lifetime, according to the decision of the CCPA, based on her being the wife of a former prime minister. The house is regularised in her name as a Member of Parliament. Besides, 24 Akbar Road and 26 Akbar Road (11,725 sq m and 3,012 sq m, respectively, meaning a total 14,737 sq m) were allocated to the Congress Seva Dal and the AICC HQ in 1990 and 1994, respectively. Both allotments were cancelled on June 26, 2013. Plot No 3, Raisina Road (9,319 sq m) was allotted for the AICC office in 1975-76. The purpose was changed, and the Jawahar Bhawan Trust is currently function­ing from this place. Apart from this, the following organisations also currently operate from this location: Rajiv Gandhi Chari­table Trust (RGCT), Brighter India Foundation (BIF), Office of Kamla Nehru Memorial Hospital, Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, and the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. Plots 3 and 4, Rouse Avenue (JNNYC) (1,886 sq m at 943 sq m each) were allotted to the Jawaharlal Nehru National Youth Centre in 1969 and 1971, respectively. Again, 23 acres of land were allotted to es­tablish the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) on the erstwhile Rajpath. Sonia Gandhi was made a lifetime trustee but was later removed by the National Democratic Al­liance (NDA). The centre has now been moved out of this area.

In 1938, when it came out with its first edition, the masthead of Congress mouthpiece National Herald proclaimed: “Freedom is in peril, defend it with all your might.” Today, the only thing in peril that the Nehru-Gandhi family seems desperate to defend with all its might is its crumbling legacy.

Edwina MountbattenIndira GandhiJawaharlal NehruKamala Nehrupersonal lettersPrime Ministers Museum & LibraryThe Lost Nehru Papers