The Modi Government on Thursday reconstituted the management of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) bringing in veteran Hindi journalist Ram Bahadur Rai as its head in place of Chinmaya Gharekhan, a former diplomat, who downplayed the reconstitution of the board saying, “there is no mystery”. He said all successive Governments have done the same in the past.
The appointment of Rai, a former news editor of Hindi daily Jansatta, as the chief of the 20-member Board of Trustees of IGNCA has drawn flak from the Congress and the left.
The IGNCA was established in 1987 when Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister as a centre for research, academic pursuit and dissemination in the field of the arts. Gharekhan was appointed during the UPA-I rule.
The reconstituted trust of IGNCA, an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Culture, will be functional with immediate effect, an official statement from the Ministry said.
Besides Rai, the Board comprises 19 other members, including classical dancers Sonal Mansingh and Padma Subrahmanyam, lyricist Prasoon Joshi, and artist Vasudeo Kamath.
The other members of the Board are Chandraprakash Dwivedi, Nitin Desai, K Arvinda Rao, Bharat Gupta, ex-chairman Khadi Village Industries Commission (KVIC) Mahesh Chandra Sharma, M Seshan, Rati Vinay Jha, Nirmala Sharma, Harsh Neotia, Saryu Doshi, DP Sinha and Viraj Yagnik. The Board also has Culture Secretary, additional secretary and financial adviser to the Culture Ministry and member secretary, IGNCA, as trustees.
Padma Subrahmanyam is the only member in the outgoing Board of Trustees who has been retained.
Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma termed the revamp of the IGNCA management as something “not done for the first time” and noted similar steps were taken in 2000, 2004 and 2007.
“See it’s a continuous process. Change is a continuous process. As a part of that, this change has been brought,” Sharma said.
He said the Government hopes to “take forward, promote and preserve the country’s culture, heritage, art and literature in the wake of the “change”.
He also noted that the new IGNCA head has been associated with thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan, besides being a “noted” journalist.
“All the 20 people (named) in the list as trustees, they are experts in their (respective) fields,” he added.
Criticising the move, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury said the reconstitution of the management of the IGNCA was “a sign of intolerance” and a step towards creation of a Hindu rashtra.
Yechury said reconstitution of various bodies represented an attempt at fulfilling the ambition of creating a Hindu rashtra by “subverting” the secular democratic structure.
“It is nothing but a sign of intolerance. The Modi Government and the RSS from the very beginning are trying to subvert the democratic and secular set-up and establish a Hindu rashtra. They want to replace the history with Hindu mythology and theology. This reconstitution is nothing but a step towards creating Hindu rashtra,” Yechury said.
Joining the chorus, the Congress too accused the Government of playing a “cruel joke” on the legacy of Indira Gandhi by bringing detractors of her policies in the reconstituted management of IGNCA.
Senior Congress spokesperson Anand Sharma said, “It reflects the mindset of the Modi dispensation. It is a cruel joke.”
He said earlier the Government “brought critics of the first Prime Minister on the Nehru Memorial Society. Now, it has done so for Indira Gandhi.”
Sharma told reporters that the development was not surprising given the fact that the government believed in “politics of confrontation” and is influenced by a “narrow” ideology and pursued a “divisive and diabolical” agenda.
However, Gharekhan downplayed the reconstitution of the trust saying “There is no mystery” in it as he noted that “all successive” governments have done the same in the past.
“There is no mystery about it. The Board of Trustees is always appointed by the Government. The Government has every right to reconstitute the board, change its composition any time it wants to. And all successive governments have done this,” Gharekhan said.