If Bapu could be saved, why not Chacha Nehru?

By M H Ahssan

Thanks to all the outrage that preceded the auction of Gandhi memorabilia, successful bidder Vijay Mallya will most likely be spared the prescribed procedure of obtaining an import license and paying customs duty of 14.71% for bringing them back. But such ad hoc exemption still leaves the need to redress the legal anomaly of placing restrictions on the import of anything of “historical interest”.

This is all the more evident from the hassles faced by a private collector before he could import last month letters written by another great Indian icon, Jawaharlal Nehru. Since he had sought to bring back Nehru’s letters without the necessary import license, B N Uniyal, a senior journalist turned collector of antiquarian books, was forced to pay, besides the usual customs duty, a hefty redemption fee and penalty.

It took about two months for Uniyal to get Delhi customs to release a cache of 23 private letters written by Nehru in early ‘50s to freedom fighter Mridula Sarabhai, who was the first woman general secretary of the Indian National Congress and sister of scientist Vikram Sarabhai. Uniyal had bought these letters in December at an auction in Sotheby’s in London.

All “collections and collectors’ pieces” of historical interest fall in the universal tariff item 9705 which, under the Indian import policy, is classified as “restricted”. This means that none of the goods covered by tariff item 9705 can be imported by a private citizen or organization without a prior license from the Director General of Foreign Trade. There is a similar restriction on goods covered by tariff item 9706, which is about antiques of an age exceeding 100 years.

The curbs put on the import of goods falling under tariff items 9705 and 9706 discourage private collectors from bringing back Indian heirloom available at auctions and markets around the world. Given the problems he faced in importing Nehru memorabilia, Uniyal hoped that the controversy over the auction of Gandhi’s belongings would be followed by “a policy reform that replaces the existing restriction with incentives”.