Prime Minister Narendra Modi looks on during the 12th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Myanmar. (Agence France-Presse)
In tweets, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today paid tribute to Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, on his birth anniversary.
"Today we mark the 125th birth anniversary of our first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. My tributes to him. We remember Pandit Nehru's efforts during the freedom struggle and his role as the first Prime Minister of India," PM Modi tweeted from Brisbane, where he will attend a G 20 summit.
Nehru's birth anniversary has been dragged into a political battle for the legacy of icons that the Congress accuses PM Modi's BJP of trying to appropriate.
The Congress alleges that the ruling BJP is ignoring Jawaharlal Nehru in its attempts to give prominence to leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Last month, a section of the Congress complained that the death anniversary of former prime minister Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1984, was side-lined by the government, which organised events nationwide drawing attention to Sardar Patel's birth anniversary the same day.
The opposition party has not invited PM Modi for its two-day Nehru conference to which some 55 political parties and world leaders have been invited. Sonia Gandhi has written personally to leaders like Mamata Banerjee, Nitish Kumar and J Jayalalithaa, but no one from the BJP or its allies have been invited to the November 17 event.
PM Modi is on a three-country, 10-day tour. He had announced that his government has special plans for Nehru's birth anniversary, celebrated as Children's Day.
Reports suggest PM Modi wants the government to come up with ways of "connecting Nehru with the masses." He reportedly shared his idea with a reconstituted committee for the commemoration of Nehru's birth anniversary, which includes three Congress members.
The prime minister reportedly told the committee that the government's schemes could be linked with Nehru's views. He had said last month that his "Swachch Bharat" or Clean India campaign would be taken to schools as a concept close to Nehru's heart.