The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi was officially renamed the Prime Ministers' Museum and Library ahead of yesterday's Independence Day celebrations.
The society's vice chairman A Surya Prakash on August 15 announced that the change had been effective on Monday. According to the Hindustan Times, he said that the date of completion coinciding with the eve of Independence Day was a "mere coincidence" and that the process had begun on June 15.
The news, however, has not been well received by the Opposition, especially the Congress party, which has accused the Modi government of "erasing" former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's legacy and "putting P instead."
On the renaming of the NMML to PMML, Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh said, "Mr 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. He has erased N and put P instead. That P is really for pettiness and peeve."
However, Ramesh maintained that the renaming could "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 he claimed is "now under assault but Mr Modi and his drumbeaters."
"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," Ramesh said.
Congress leader Sandeep Dikshit also took a jab at the Opposition, claiming they have a "frustrated mindset."
"If you suppress or remove something, it means that your motive was never exhibition but an attempt to suppress the golden history of India," Dikshit said.
Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut has joined the condemnation, questioning the BJP government's decision.
"What else are they left with?...You may change the name of the building but you can't change the name of Pandit Nehru that is mentioned in history. You can't change the history created by Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Savarkar ji...You can't create a history like them so you are changing names," Raut said.
The choice to alter the library's name had previously stirred strong responses from the Congress party. The Teen Murti Bhavan had functioned as the official residence of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
The BJP, however, has hit back at the Congress with MP Ravi Shankar claiming that the grand old party only thinks about Nehru and the Gandhi family.
"There is a basic difference between the thinking of Congress party and Jairam Ramesh and PM Narendra Modi. They (Congress) think that only Nehru ji and family matters. Narendra Modi gave a respectful position to all the PMs of the country at the museum...Why did Lal Bahadur Shastri get no space there? There was neither Indira Gandhi nor Rajiv Gandhi there nor Morarji Desai or Chaudhary Charan Singh or Atal Bihari Vajpayee or IK Gujral or HD Deve Gowda...When all the PMs are getting a space, it is becoming Pradhanmantri Smriti Library," Shankar said.
