Should the age-old work of collecting and safeguarding India's ancient manuscripts really become a political football? Union Culture and Tourism Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat does not think so — and on Thursday, September 24, 2026, he said exactly that on X, pushing back sharply against what he described as politically motivated questioning of manuscript preservation efforts.

Posting in Hindi, Shekhawat wrote: 'यहाँ तो राजनीति के लिए पाण्डुलिपियों के संग्रह और संरक्षण पर भी सवाल उठाए जा रहे हैं, क्या ऐसा करना सही है?' — which translates as: 'Here, even the collection and conservation of manuscripts is being questioned for political reasons — is this right?'

What the National Mission for Manuscripts Actually Does

The minister's defence points directly to the National Mission for Manuscripts, a Ministry of Culture initiative that has been running since 2003. Its mandate is straightforward: survey, document, conserve, and digitise India's vast manuscript heritage — palm-leaf texts, paper folios, and birch-bark scrolls scattered across temples, monasteries, private collections, and regional libraries.

India holds one of the largest manuscript collections in the world, with estimates running into tens of millions of handwritten texts spanning subjects from classical literature and astronomy to medicine and philosophy. The Mission's core argument has always been that these materials are fragile, irreplaceable, and under active threat from climate, neglect, and time. Conservation, by that logic, is a race against loss — not a political act.

When Heritage Work Becomes a Political Charge

Shekhawat's pointed rhetorical question — 'Is this right?' — reflects a recurrent tension in Indian cultural policy. Critics of heritage programmes have periodically argued that government-backed conservation projects carry selective emphasis, amplifying certain traditions or regions over others. The minister's post pushes back against that framing, insisting that the basic act of collecting and preserving manuscripts should stand beyond political contestation.

The exchange also signals that manuscript digitisation — once a quiet, technical process — has entered the louder arena of cultural politics, where questions of whose history gets funded and whose gets preserved are increasingly contested.

For manuscript scholars and heritage institutions, the stakes are practical as well as symbolic: sustained funding and political will are what keep digitisation targets on track and conservation labs open. When the work itself becomes controversial, those commitments become harder to secure.

The real question Shekhawat is raising has no partisan answer: can a civilisation afford to let its oldest written records decay while arguing about who benefits from saving them?