Gandhi letter to be brought to India: Pranab

New Delhi, Jul 3: External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee assured the nation that a rare Gandhi letter, whose bid at the Christie's today was stopped at the intervention of Indian authorities, would be brought back to the country.

''You need not worry over the great national asset. The seven-page letter written by Gandhiji will be in the country,'' he told reporters.

''We are bringing it back,'' he said, after attending a UPA-Left meeting to muster support for Presidential nominee Pratibha Patil.

India prevailed upon Christie's to prevent the January 11, 1948 letter, which was to be published in his mouthpiece 'Harijan,' from going under the hammer in London today.

India will have to pay for the letter priced at between 9,000 and 12,000 pounds ((18,000-24,100 dollars). However, the government has not disclosed the exact amount it would pay for preventing the letter from falling into private hands.

Amin Jaffer, International Director of Asian Art at Christie's, said, ''We are pleased to have facilitated the negotiations which have resulted in an important historical record returning to India.'The letter is signed ''M. K. Gandhi' and was written 19 days before his assassination on January 30, 1948.

The issue was brought to the notice of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by two staunch Gandhians B K Birla and Satya Paul, who urged him to intervene and prevent the letter from being auctioned.

The Culture Ministry then dashed off a missive to the External Affairs Ministry, seeking its intervention to prevent the auction.

The letter is a part of the most comprehensive collection of handwritten letters. The collection is titled 'The Albin Schram Collection of Autograph Letters', a personal and private collection assembled over a period of 30 years by the late Albin Schram.

The collection includes 570 lots of handwritten manuscripts by many of the most notable figures from the 13th to 20th centuries, including Lord Byron, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth I, Sigmund Freud, Napoleon, Sir Isaac Newton, Oliver Cromwell and Oscar Wilde.

In the historic letter, Gandhiji expressed regret for having to discontinue the Urdu edition of his paper 'Harijan' owing to dwindling readership.

''The dwindle was to me a sign of resentment against its publication. My view remains unalterable especially at this critical juncture in our history. It is wrong to ruffle Muslim or any other person's feeling when there is no question of ethics,'' he wrote.

The letter ends with a ringing call to 'Muslim friends' not only to support the Urdu edition but to learn the Nagari script and thus 'enrich their intellectual capital.'

UNI

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