Atal’s ex-aide likely to head Nehru memorial

NEW DELHI: The culture ministry seems to have turned a deaf ear to the criticisms it received over the selection of director of Nehru Memorial Museum & Library and is likely to appoint Shakti Sinha, former bureaucrat and private secretary to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, as the new head of the institute.

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The ministry is likely to make an announcement after Raksha Bandhan. “The appointment for the director at NMML will be announced soon. Shakti Sinha will be selected as the new director of the premier institution,” said a source in the culture ministry.

Recently, a prominent member of Nehru Memorial’s Executive Council (EC), Pratap Bhanu Mehta, had quit allegedly over the shortlisting of Sinha, who reportedly was a director in India Foundation, a think tank aligned to RSS till a few days back.

“The government is not going to scrap the process as due procedures have been followed,” the sources said.

The post of director at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) is lying vacant since last year after UPA appointee Mahesh Rangarajan stepped down as the ruling NDA described his appointment as “illegal and unethical”.

An IAS officer of 1979 batch from AGMUT cadre, Sinha was considered as a highly influential joint secretary in Vajpayee’s PMO in the late 1990s. He had also served as private secretary to Vajpayee.

Established in the memory of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, NMML is an autonomous institution under the ministry of culture.