Members of the Agra Heritage Group and conservationists in Agra have demanded a thorough probe into a recent report suggesting that an agreement had been reached between Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah to shift the Taj Mahal to Pakistan.

This was reported in the French journal ‘Asialyst’ quoting a statement of eminent French historian and Indophile Michel Angot who in an interview had claimed that in 1947 Nehru and Jinnah had agreed to dismantle the Taj Mahal and shift it to Pakistan.

French language specialist in Agra, Dr Mukul Pandya said that Michel Angot, a Sanskrit scholar who taught at different institutions including the University of Paris X and the INALCO, died recently, on April 8, leaving behind a rich legacy of research articles and reports.

Dr Pandya said Michel Angot represented a unique characteristic, his capacity to use his deep knowledge about ancient India to facilitate a better understanding of modern India. In his interview with the Asialyst in 2017 on the occasion of the release of ‘Histoire des Indes’, he explained why it was so difficult to deal with the historical realities of India.

According to his interview in 2017 published in the Asialyst, Nehru and Jinnah in 1947 discussed the dismantling of the Taj Mahal and its rebuilding in Pakistan. “Both of them agree. They realize that this monument is not only the most famous but also a Muslim monument. It is something like considering the great mosque in Paris as the icon of France.” However, it was due to the lack of funds that the Taj Mahal could not be dismantled for rebuilding in Pakistan.

In his History of India, Michel Angot writes “When the British Raj was divided, there was talk of dismantling the Taj Mahal and rebuilding it in Pakistan. Jinnah and Nehru agreed and it was due to a lack of money that the project never got off the ground”.

Members of the Agra Heritage Group have asked the union culture ministry to scan all records and documents of the period to check the veracity of this claim. If there is an iota of truth then the Nehruvian secularists would need to do a lot of explaining. What if the demolition exercise had been initiated? We would have lost a precious heritage asset, heritage conservationists said.

Once before, in 1828, the then governor-general William Bentinck had tried to dismantle and sell the Taj Mahal to a Seth of Mathura to fill the cash-starved coffers with money, but fearing backlash and the costs involved the plan was given up.