New Delhi: The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) and a Bharatiya Janata Party-affiliated think-tank, the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, are reportedly going to jointly publish the complete works of Jan Sangh leader Syama Prasad Mookerjee.According to a report in the Economic Times, the executive council of the NMML selected the think-tank, which had first floated the idea of March 2016, to be the nodal agency for the project. After the idea was first proposed, the NMML reportedly had several questions on the nature of the project. Those clarifications have been provided and work is now set to begin, officials at the NMML told the newspaper. It could take as along as two years to complete.The Economic Times has reported that a ten-member research team will be working on the project, including Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Das Gupta and Delhi University professor Sangeet Ragi. The team is based in New Delhi and Kolkata.The first few books of the ten-volume set will reportedly be out before December this year. Not only will the volumes talk about Mookerjee’s lesser known work, they will also include interviews and with people who either worked with him or studied his work closely from Rangoon, Silchar and Jammu, Economic Times reported. “Mookerjee’s work as a minister in prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet, his fall out with Nehru and what went into his conception of the idea of Jan Sangh, his struggle for integration of Kashmir and his role as the president of the Hindu Maha Sabha, his contribution to the growth of institutions such as Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore are among other focuses, said those involved in the research,” the report continues.Anirban Ganguly, the director of Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, told Economic Times that a project of this kind should have been undertaken years ago, but never was because of the “intellectual apathy” of Left-liberal academics. “Leaders such as Syama Prasad Mookerjee clearly faced this marginalisation just because their views and actions did not fall under a certain spectrum. Since the seventies, a particular group has controlled the academia. In West Bengal particularly, the political marginalisation was more because Mookerjee’s views on the nation were not in line with what the communists thought,” he said.According to Ganguly, former President Pranab Mukherjee had positive things to say about the project. “Among other issues, he spoke extensively about Syama Prasad Mookerjee and his role in drafting the 1948 industrialisation policy and his efforts that went into making Jan Sangh the primary opposition party in just six years of the party’s formation,” Ganguly said.In 2016, the NMML had hosted an exhibition on Mookerjee, titled ‘Syama Prasad Mookerjee: A Selfless Patriot’. Historians had then questioned the institute’s portrayal of the Jan Sangh founder.The NMML has been a casualty of the ‘culture wars’ between the BJP and the Congress. While one side is pushing for including right-wing thinkers in the museum’s library and the projects it funds, others believe that this to be just another attempt by the government to assert direct control over key cultural and educational bodies with a view to changing their characterQuestions around the work being carried out at the NMML and how much the government is interfering in it were raised both when former director Mahesh Rangarajan quit after a public spat with culture minister Mahesh Sharma, and when Pratap Bhanu Mehta resigned as member of the executive committee to protest the manner in which the institution’s reputation and integrity were being compromised by attempts to foist a politically-connected bureaucrat as director.