LAHORE, Oct 3: A high-level committee has rejected the chief secretary’s plan to dismantle the Punjab Civil Secretariat’s central record room. It, however, recommended that the Anarkali’s Tomb should be cleared of its historical archives and opened to public after restoration.

The decision to turn the central record room, made by the British administration of Punjab, into a committee room was reportedly taken by Chief Secretary Javed Mehmood who ordered shifting of its treasure to the small rooms of the old IGP office.

But the leakage of the plan worried many officials knowing the importance of the files and historical value of the record room. As a result, a committee constituted by the chief secretary under Information Secretary Auriya Maqbool Jan to suggest restoration of the colonial-era secretariat to its original form took up the matter and rejected the decision to shift the central record room.

Officials quoted the committee as saying that the central record room was a historical place that reflected how efficiently the British rulers had kept their record for history and evidence. It would be a crime to damage the cabinets of the record room because they were made of rare and costly wood, a specimen of excellent record-keeping.

They said the committee decided to shift the archives of the Anarkali’s Tomb to the Bab-i-Pakistan provided a purpose-built place was created in its basement. The authorities were building an art gallery and a library at the monument, and the addition of the archives section would help the people view the Pakistan Movement through official record.

The committee, they said, wanted to restore the Anarkali’s Tomb to its original shape and open it to the public.

Meanwhile, a sub-committee constituted by the main committee has been asked to hunt original doors of Sikh period from the Walled City so that their design could be copied for all doors of the chief secretary’s block built for Maharaja Ranjeet Singh’s French General Ventura.

The hunt has begun to fulfill Chief Secretary Javed Mehmood’s latest wish of replacing the existing doors of his block with new ones that should reflect the Sikh-period carpentry. Officials said the committee under archaeology director-general Pervaiz Abbas would particularly inspect the doors of Mochi Gate’s Mubarak Haveli from where Ranjeet Singh had extracted Kohinoor from Afghanistan’s exiled king Shah Shuja. — Intikhab Hanif