Her claim is that the library didn’t have, earlier, the complete recent history output of OUP, Sage and Permanent Black; now, some signatories worry it doesn’t even have the most obvious recent books from, say, New York University’s Simon Schama.

•The third objective indicator is “staff morale”. Morale is generally considered to be a quality both individual and intangible, attributes not usually associated with good “objective” indicators. The petition states that “several dozen” consultants have been hired, creating an unaccountable parallel power structure. The relevant number, according to an NMML Executive Council submission, appears to be closer to six.

They are mostly paid well below Rs 20,000 a month; Mukherjee says she depends on consultants because rules haven’t allowed her to make even one appointment from within the system. But that a parallel structure has been created is undeniable, according to staff interviews. Whether it is more or less accountable than the structure in which everyone’s a permanent government employee is debatable.

•Finally, the petition alleges that plurality of thought is “denied” at the centre. Studying a list of public lectures, it’s clear there is a significant overlap between those with those invited to speak at the NMML and those the director knows and has worked with — a group “anti the BJP, sympathetic to the Left, but not of it.”

Of the 17 book discussions since Mukherjee took over in August 2006, 11 were mainstream academic histories but nine of those were written or edited by those seen as close to the “particular faction” in the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU — two of the the books were by Bipan Chandra himself. Of the 21 talks during the period, only five were by Indian historians and four of them are considered as allies of that faction.

... contd.