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Lucknow: It is not
everyday that a 10-year-old catches the office of the prime
minister of India off-guard and without answers. But then, Aishwarya Parashar, a Class 6 student, is no ordinary girl.
For she has stumped PMO officials with her Right to Information (RTI)
query on when and by what orders was the title of 'Father of the
Nation' conferred on Mahatma Gandhi.
Sitting in her small but neatly kept house in Rajajipuram F Block,
the backdrop of teddy bears and toys makes her just any other
Barbie doll loving girl next door.
But this is only till she starts to speak. Aishwarya, a student of
the City Montessori School, Rajajipuram branch, chuckles
throughout the conversation on how her mother has "groomed her
into the RTI mode", adding that she finds the Act so helpful that
she has filed two RTIs against garbage dumps outside her school,
in the past.
Asked what prompted her to file the RTI application on Gandhi and
send it to the PMO, Aishwarya told IANS how the term 'Father of
the Nation' had always "somehow excited and interested" her after
she read it in her social studies text book.
"I would keep asking my mom 'why is Gandhi referred to as the
Father of the Nation', to which my mother mostly had no answers
till one fine day she thought of the RTI route". Her mother
Urvashi Sharma is happy that the PMO has "at least taken
cognizance of the letter", even if the response has not been to
their satisfaction.
Aishwarya, the eldest of three siblings, had written to the PMO on
Feb 13, seeking a photocopy of the government order (GO) that
conferred the famous title of Father of Nation on Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi. The PMO replied that they had no such record
whatsoever and directed the query to the Ministry of Home Affairs
(MHA), which then referred the case to the National Archives of
India (NAI).
The NAI's Assistant Director and central Public Information
Officer Jayprabha Ravindran also had no answers to the poser by
the Lucknow girl, and responded with an invite to Aishwarya asking
her to visit the Archives to find for herself if there were any
such relevant papers. Daughter of Sanjay Parashar, a lecturer at
GB Pant Polytechnic College, Aishwarya's mother is an RTI activist
as well.
The NAI, she added, vide a letter dated March 26, was an
institution to provide documents and was not in any way a reserach
helping body. It however offered all facilities to the girl in her
"quest for the Gandhi research."
History however holds that the title of Father of the Nation was
given to the Mahatma by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who in his
address on Singapore Radio on July 6, 1944 has addressed Mahatma
Gandhi as Father of the Nation. Thereafter on April 28, 1947
Gandhi was referred with the same title by Sarojini Naidu at a
conference.
(Mohit Dubey can be
contacted at mohit.d@ians.in)
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