New Delhi:Shakti Sinha, private secretary to former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, has been appointed as director of Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML).

“Shakti Sinha has been appointed as the new director of the premier institution,” a source said.

The official announcement on the appointment would be made soon, the source said.

The post of director at NMML is lying vacant since last year after UPA appointee Mahesh Rangarajan stepped down after the ruling NDA described his appointment as “illegal and unethical”.

An IAS officer of 1979 batch from AGMUT cadre, Sinha was considered as a highly influential joint secretary in Vajpayee’s PMO in the late 1990s. He had also served as private secretary to Vajpayee.

He had taken voluntary retirement in 2013 when he was serving as Finance secretary in Delhi government.

The advertisement issued for the director’s post was also reportedly modified at the last moment to accommodate Sinha.

Controversy erupted over the appointment of NMML director after a prominent member of its Executive Council (EC) Pratap Bhanu Mehta quit allegedly over shortlisting of Sinha, who reportedly until a few days ago was a director in India Foundation, a think tank aligned to RSS.

Besides renowned political scientist Mehta, there were five others in the selection committee, headed by Minister of State for External Affairs and vice-chairperson of NMML’s EC M J Akbar who is also on the India Foundation board.

A strong dissenting voice also came from Nitin Desai, economist and former Under Secretary General of the UN, at a meeting last week over two names — Sinha and Indira Gandhi National Open University academic Kapil Kumar.

It was, however, widely speculated that government may scrap the whole process of the selection, taking note of the dissenting voices and start the process afresh.

Established in the memory of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, NMML is an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Culture.

PTI