New Delhi: Talking about the past is risky, for it can “take away attention from what is happening in the present,” said historian Rajmohan Gandhi last week at Jawahar Bhawan. Yet he avoided that trap by tying a lecture on India’s founding fathers to current realities, from Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York to a Muslim child being slapped in an Uttar Pradesh classroom.

At ‘Invitation to Yesterday’, the opening chapter of the Dastan-e-Nehru series organised by the social platform Nehruvian and the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, Gandhi spoke about Jawaharlal Nehru, MK Gandhi, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, and BR Ambedkar not to retreat into nostalgia, but to challenge the “falsehoods that mystify the founding fathers of our nation.”

The audience was filled with students and history aficion

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