Smriti Irani to uphold Patel’s legacy on AIR

Information & Broadcasting minister Smriti Irani will deliver this year’s Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture on the All India Radio on October 31. She will be the third woman since 1955 to deliver the lecture, following historian Romila Thapar (1972) and late Justice Leila Seth (2000).

Efforts by NHS to find out the subject of her talk drew a blank but a Prasar Bharati official cheekily said on condition of anonymity that he heard she would be speaking on ‘One tax, one nation’. The pre-recorded lecture will be translated and aired in several Indian languages on the birth anniversary of Sardar Patel, who was also the first Information and Broadcasting Minister.

The choice of Smriti Irani has evoked surprise with observers pointing out that the first lecture in the series had been delivered by C Rajagopalachari, the last Governor General of India, who had opted to speak on ‘The Good Administrator’. Since then every year prominent people from different walks of life were invited to deliver the lecture.

Since 2014, however, when BJP MP Chandan Mitra delivered the lecture, all speakers have been Union ministers. Arun Jaitley, the then I & B minister, did the honours in 2015 while next year it was the turn of Jitendra Singh, MoS at the PMO.

Accusing the Modi government of downgrading the lecture series, activist and Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi expressed surprise at the choice of Irani.

“Irani stands nowhere compared to the stature of, say Romila Thapar and Leela Seth; yet she has been invited. What is her contribution to the society? She professes allegiance to an organisation which was banned by none other than Sardar Patel for its role in the murder of the Gandhi’s killing,” she fumed while referring to the RSS.

During the UPA, confided an official, writers, economists and public intellectuals were generally invited to deliver the lecture. But now for the past four years, only BJP leaders have delivered the lecture, said AIR insiders.

The website of Prasar Bharati itself provides the proof. Planning Commission Vice Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia (2005), journalist and editor N Ram (2006), historian Bipan Chandra (2007) and environmentalist Rajendra Pachauri (2008) were some such people to have delivered the lecture.

While the controversy over Irani brews, the 62-year old lecture series does seem to call the BJP’s bluff that the Congress all these years did nothing to honour the Loha Purush or the ‘Iron man of India’.