After 41 years, AMU invites Gandhi family — to honour Nehru

The last person from the Nehru-Gandhi clan to visit AMU was the grand patriarch himself—Nehru was the chief guest at the Sir Sayyad Ahmad Khan Day on October 17, 1962.

Neither Indira Gandhi nor Rajiv Gandhi was invited for any of the numerous seminars, convocation ceremonies, and other functions held at the university over the years.

One reason was the gradual alienation of the Muslim community from the Congress with the Muslim intelligentsia, epitomised by AMU dons and students, critical of the Congress’s flirtation with Hindu communalism in the 1980s.

This alienation reached its zenith after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, with Congress regarded with almost as much hostility as the BJP.

In the last few years, though, some of that hostility has abated and a number of Congress leaders such as Manmohan Singh, Salman Khursheed, Louise Khursheed, and J N Dixit have been invited by the university on different occasions.

But the invitation to the Congress president marks a turning point and indicates that Muslims in UP, or at least the educated sections among them, are willing to review their relationship with the party, Khursheed said.

Elaborating, former AMU students’ union president Adeeb Ahmad, said the Gujarat carnage last year was a ‘‘watershed’’ in many ways. Since then, the Muslim intelligentsia has begun to realise that their long-term security lies in allying with a national party and there is a renewed nostalgia for Nehruvian secularism to which they hope the Congress, under Sonia, will return.

Significantly, the seminar to which Sonia has been invited is being organised by the the AMU’s Centre for Nehru Studies which was set up through a UGC grant in 2001. Speaking to The Indian Express, the director of the centre, T A Nizami, said apart from scholars pursuing their PhD programmes, the Centre also runs six-week orientation programmes for students of different disciplines.

Each year has seen an increased interest in Nehru studies—in 2001 53 students enrolled for the course, in 2002 it climbed to 80, and in 2003 to 110. The subject of this year’s seminar—on December 13-14—is ‘‘Nehru and Nationalism.’’ Scholars from across the country are expected to attend and the proceedings will be published as a book, Nizami said.