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Nehru memorial library member resigns in protest
NEW DELHI: Academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta has quit his post as executive committee member of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library citing “political pressures”. The move
NEW DELHI: Academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta has quit his post as executive committee member of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library citing “political pressures”. The move comes as another blow to the Modi government’s strengthening grip over top academic institutions.
Bhanu is the second official at Nehru Memorial to resign. Last year, historian Mahesh Rangarajan quit his post as the director.
Mehta was upset over the choice of a bureaucrat as the director of the institution over a candidate with intellectual scholarship. The bureaucrat, Shakti Sinha, an Indian Administrative Service officer, was a private secretary to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
In his resignation letter, which Hindustan Times has seen, Mehta said appointing an administrator “as the number one choice” sends a “very bad signal”. He said the advertisement put out for a candidate tweaked the qualifications for the post of director to include bureaucrats or administrators, which was never the case before.
Nehru Memorial, at the sprawling Teen Murti Bhawan — the official home of India’s first prime minister — is not just an ornamental monument dedicated to Jawaharlal Nehru. It’s also a leading think-tank for social-sciences scholarship.
Mehta told HT he had “nothing more to add” to why he quit. However, the contents of his resignation letter are emblematic of a familiar battle playing out in the world of academia under the Modi government.
Mehta said there was an “impression that good academics will find it very difficult to function in the institutional set up we have created, with its multiple political and administrative pressures”. “We are doing everything to exacerbate the impression…”
Some of the Modi government’s top nominations have led to the outrage. These include appointment of actor Gajendra Chauhan as the chairman of FTII, India’s premier film institute, and former cricketer Chetan Chauhan as the head of the National Institute of Fashion Technology.
Last year, opposition MPs in Parliament had criticized the government for infusing rightwing Hindu nationalist ideology into the country’s education sector through political appointments.
