Given its record, Congress mustn’t complain
The outrage in the Congress camp over the Union Government's decision to discontinue postage stamps featuring former Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi is entirely uncalled for. In the first place, members of the Nehru-Gandhi family do not have the birthright to be always featured in the special stamps. And second, the discontinuation has nothing to do with any supposed attempt by the Narendra Modi Government to belittle the contribution of these leaders. The Congress had during its rules since Independence, never bothered to look beyond the family to honour personalities that had played a stellar role in the country socio-political sphere. Thus, the likes of Deendayal Upadhyay, Syama Prasad Mookerjee and BR Ambedkar, not to speak of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Sri Aurobindo, Damodar Vinayak ‘Veer' Savarkar and other revolutionaries who dared to strike out away from the Nehru-Gandhi family controlled Congress, were either ignored or demonised. This had to be corrected, and it is only appropriate that the incumbent regime has decided to bring a few of the marginalised but tall leaders of our freedom movement into the limelight, by the issuance of special stamps. There is no question of twisting or distorting history, as the Congress alleges. Indeed, this allegation sits pretty on the Congress and the leftists who crafted and promoted a narrative which reeked of personal prejudice, thus denying many personalities the due they deserved. In any case, every party in power has the right to honour its icons through various means — and the issuance of postage stamps in their names is one of the means to do so. And, is the Congress actually opposing the Government's decision to honour the likes of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Swami Vivekananda and Jayaprakash Narayan, among othersIJ It's time the party admitted that there have been others besides the Nehru-Gandhi family who have done their bit for the freedom movement. Additionally, it must not forget that it had begun the practice of bringing out postage stamps in the name of individuals; prior to that, stamps commemorated events or monuments.
The Congress's discomfort goes beyond postage stamps. Of late, it has been accusing the BJP-led NDA regime of seeking to dismantle the primacy of the Nehru-Gandhis — it calls the attempt as petty. It has, with support from leftist historians, taken exception to the Government's move to revamp the Nehru Memorial Museum and library. But all that the Centre has said is that it plans to make the NMMl more inclusive and ‘contemporary' by turning the spotlight on other important but so-far-sidelined personalities of public standing, without questioning Nehru’s stature. Congress leaders must shed their hyper-sensitivity and acknowledge that there is life beyond the Nehru-Gandhi family. Feudal days are long gone.