Mukherjee’s supporters say the motives aren’t as grand as that. “It’s a desperate grab for power,” said one of them.

The letter cites four “objective” indicators to claim that NMML is in decline under Mukherjee. The Indian Express investigated these claims:

•First: “Since 2006, not a single publication has emanated from the NMML”; an academic journal and the “seminal” Occasional Paper series were shut down. Books are certainly no longer published by the Nehru Memorial but work done at the NMML has been published instead by Oxford University Press (OUP) and Pearson.

Fellows, and others interviewed, see this as a good move: one frequently-made comparison was the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla, which insists that work be published in-house — but which has no marketing apparatus, so it’s published, but seldom read.

The journals and paper series were stopped, claims NMML, because of numbers: the journal, started in 2001, never sold more than 62 copies, even when free. But the NMML’s argument is clearly spurious. Journals and papers are never bestsellers and no attempt was made to put them online, where they would certainly have been read widely.

Further, the journal was not peer-reviewed, as is customary, and its quality consequently suffered. More than one of the petition’s signatories, when pressed, could not remember a single article from the “excellent journal”.

The Occasional Paper series, meanwhile, appears to have been replaced many years ago by a series of “NMML Monographs”, attempts at finished articles, not the usual works-in-progress.

... contd.