Lost ground: Eroded bank of the Brahmaputra in Majuli

New Delhi, July 22: It was a small but significant blow for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the cultural front.

Like the nuclear deal, Singh, a Rajya Sabha member from Assam, had stuck his neck out for a World Heritage Site status for Majuli island.

But his pet project — jokingly referred to as the “nuclear deal” in heritage circles — ran into similar political opposition.

A bitter race ended in a massive blow for the Prime Minister.

India’s stake for the prestigious title for the river island on the Brahmaputra in Jorhat was voted down at the 32nd meeting of the World Heritage Committee of the Unesco in Quebec in Canada early this month.

The inclusion of Majuli on Unesco’s world heritage list — an emotive issue in Assam — was defeated by politics at various levels, sources in the ministry of culture claimed.

Pushed by the Prime Minister to ensure that the river island of the state he represents as a member of the Upper House gets a World Heritage Site tag, real concerns — even within the ranks of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), the nodal agency for the nomination of Indian sites on the World Heritage List — were brushed aside to bring Majuli to the Unesco committee.

However, it was the final thrust — in terms of hardselling the nomination to the World Heritage Committee — that finally spelt doom for the river island’s hopes, sources claimed.

The committee, in a rare case, asked for a secret ballot in which the nomination was defeated by a slim margin.

“It has been perceived that the nomination was lobbied for too hard,” highly-placed sources in the ministry claimed. “There were genuine technical concerns that needed to be discussed and so the debate was pushed to the next day at the meeting. But the lobbying for the island was done so aggressively that a few states, including the US, asked for a secret ballot on the issue the next day.”

While secret ballots are not unheard of, experts familiar with Unesco rules claimed that it was unusual.

There was strong lobbying against the nomination, they said.Doomed from the beginning even when Majuli came up before the World Heritage Committee in 2006, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (Icomos), the technical wing that evaluates all heritage proposals, had recommended that the nomination be deferred till “more information'' was assembled.

“The pressure to nominate Majuli was coming from the highest office,” according to sources in the culture ministry.

“The ASI had never done such a nomination before. There had always been serious concerns within the heritage community. But because of the political implications, no doubt was allowed to be spoken openly.”

The World Heritage Committee in 2006 had listed areas that it wanted more inputs on — the way satras (monasteries) had influenced the environment, a risk assessment strategy and a legal framework for protection of the island.