Nehru's works offer 'compass' to India's evolving conscience: Rahul Gandhi

India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's writings are not just history, they are a record of India's evolving conscience, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said on Friday, asserting that for anyone seeking to understand the nation's democratic journey, his words remain a powerful compass.

Gandhi's remarks came over the completion of the digitisation of 'Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru'.

The 'Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru' is now online with an entire set of 100 volumes, containing some 35,000 documents and about 3,000 illustrations related to the country's first prime minister, digitised and available free of cost for downloading.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge also hailed the development.

"Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes' Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. In an era of deliberate distortion, disinformation and misinformation regarding Pandit Nehru and his colossal achievements for India, it is worthwhile to digitise his writings for truth and posterity, Kharge said on X.

I am happy that The Nehru Archive' is now live: nehruarchive.in. This is India's first comprehensive, open-access digital archive of Jawaharlal Nehru's writings letters, speeches, notes & more, all interconnected and freely available for easy access, he said  In a post on X, Gandhi said Nehru's writings are not just history, they are a record of India's evolving conscience.

"For anyone seeking to understand our nation's democratic journey --? its courage, its doubts, its dreams --? his words remain a powerful compass," the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said.

"I'm glad this legacy is now open, searchable, and free for all. It will keep getting expanded. Dive into the new archive," Gandhi said and shared a link to the archive.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh, a trustee of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund (JNMF) that carried out the exercise, on Thursday said its second phase would entail efforts to locate letters to Nehru.

Ramesh said the Gandhi-Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel-Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose-Nehru correspondence is fairly comprehensive, but that is not the case with certain other correspondences such as Winston Churchill-Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore-Nehru. He said incorporating that would be of the biggest value addition to the Nehru archive.

Ramesh called for the integration of archives of leading lights of the time such as Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, B R Ambedkar and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.

"The Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund is happy to announce that the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru is now fully available online, as promised on November 14, 2024. The website The Nehru Archive is available on nehruarchive.in. The entire set of 100 volumes have been digitized; they may be searched and freely downloaded: and they may be used with equal ease on the mobile as on the laptop," a JNMF release said.

The facsimiles of the original print version are also available alongside the digital text, it said.

This online version would be of immense benefit to anybody who wishes to study any aspect of Indian history from the 1920s to the 1960s, the years when Nehru was a major leader of the movement for Independence and thereafter was prime minister of the country, the statement said.

"It contains some 35,000 documents and about 3,000 illustrations. From volume 44 onward, that is, from September 1958, his speeches in the original Hindi, and an English translation, are also available. The documents consist of his correspondence, speeches, interviews, administrative noting on files, diary entries, and even doodles," the JNMF said.

Ramesh said the archives have been sourced from 77,000 pages and 35,000 artefacts which are documented and spread over 61 years.