Is Congress president Sonia Gandhi preventing an important piece of Indian history from coming to light? Nayantara Sahgal, Jawaharlal Nehru’s niece, thinks so.
In Jaipur to attend a literature festival, Sahgal, daughter of Nehru’s sister Vijaylakshmi Pandit, sparked off yet another debate on Nehru’s relations with Edwina Mountbatten when she said Sonia was against the publication of the first prime minister’s letters to the last viceroy’s wife.
“The letters between Nehru and Edwina are being kept under wraps by the copyright holders of his works. The Mountbattens were not against publishing them,” Sahgal said.
The issue started when Catherine Clement, author of Edwina and Nehru: A Novel, asked Sahgal who in the Nehru-Gandhi family was against the publication of the letters. “It is Sonia,” Sahgal answered, “Or may be Rahul has them now; I don’t know.”
Sahgal told Clement she had spoken to Sonia, telling her that it is a pity not to publish the letters. “(But) I think Sonia was afraid and I could see her point. She felt that the political opposition might try to gain advantage out of it.”
When Clement asked what “political advantage” opposition parties can have, Sahgal said: “As I said, our national leaders are not supposed to have sex organs… If it (is) proved that Nehru had (them), then it would be a disaster.
“I hope very much that those letters come to light. My mother had read many of them and she said they were very beautiful... and they are literature.”
While being evasive about whether Nehru and Edwina had a physical relationship, both Clement and Sahgal agreed that whatever they had between them was special. “Whether they went to bed or not is pure conjecture. No one really knows about it, except them,” Sahgal said.
Clement quoted a letter from Edwina to her husband Lord Mountbatten in which she wrote: “Those are love letters in a sense so you yourself realise a strange relationship, most of it spiritual, that exists betweens us. Jawaharlal has obviously meant a great deal in my life… and I think I in his too.”
