ICHR white paper soon

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, FEB. 22. The Chairman of the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), Prof. B.R. Grover, announced today that a white paper on the ``Towards Freedom'' project would be published shortly in view of the controversies it had spawned since its inception in the early Seventies.

The white paper would include all relevant documents relating to the objectives of the project, its ``changing guidelines, shifting deadlines and mounting expenditure'', he said, pointing out that there had been inordinate delays in completing it. At one point, ``in disgust'' the Government had decided to wind up the project, but it was ``salvaged'' following his intervention as then director and acting chairman of ICHR, Prof. Grover said.

He defended the ICHR decision to withdraw the volumes by Prof. Sumit Sarkar and Prof. K.N. Panikkar, saying that it had been decided to review all manuscripts in view of the ``adverse'' reaction to earlier volumes. During the Council meetings on August 31 and September 1, 1998, it was decided to constitute a committee to ``streamline'' publication of the remaining volumes before they were printed. However, a three-member committee which was set up was ``never convened by the then chairman, Prof. S. Settar''.

Another committee had now been set up for this purpose. It comprised Prof. Satish Mittal, former head of the History Department, Kurukshetra University, Prof. Hari Om, head of the History Department, Jammu University, and Prof. A.R. Khan, former head of the History Department, Himachal University.

Prof. Grover said the committee should not be confused with the one set up by the Human Resource Development Ministry for a ``periodic review'' of the functioning and work of ICHR.

He contended that the ICHR, which was the copyright holder and which was ``controlling the finances of the project'', had ``every right - legal and moral - to satisfy itself that the volumes published under its seal of authority'' were upto the mark, and conformed to the original guidelines. One of these was that the documents should be arranged in a chronological order, and not thematically as had been done after the guidelines were changed by Prof. Irfan Habib when he was ICHR chairman.

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