Truth: Pandit Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten shared a healthy relationship – based on mutual admiration and respect for each other but this relationship was completely platonic. This is well documented in several journals.
Pamela Mountbatten, Edwina’s daughter, writes in her book, “Daughter of Empire: Life as a Mountbatten”, that her mother and Nehru shared a “profound relationship” that bloomed after Edwina arrived in India along with her husband and India’s last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1947. Pamela was 17-years-old then and says that she saw the first stages of what would go on to become a relationship based on “equality of spirit and intellect”. “She found in Panditji the companionship and equality of spirit and intellect that she craved,” Pamela is quoted as saying by PTI.
Reading Nehru’s inner thoughts and feelings for her mother in his letters made Pamela “realise how deeply he and my mother loved and respected each other”.
Pamela says that she was intensely curious to know more about the extent of the relationship between Nehru and Edwina. She wanted to find out whether or not their affair had been sexual in nature” but after having read the letters, she was utterly convinced it hadn’t been.
They neither had the time, nor the space to wallow in a physical relationship. “Quite apart from the fact that neither my mother nor Panditji had time to indulge in a physical affair, they were rarely alone. They were always surrounded by staff, police and other people,” Pamela writes.
Pamela goes on to say that she spoke to Freddie Burnaby Atkins, Lord Mountbatten’s aide-de-camp, who told her that Nehru and Edwina would have found it impossible to carry on a physical affair due to the very public lives they led.
Thus, this Nehru-Edwina affair rumour is nothing but a lie spread by people of a certain ideology – which is narrow-minded and regressive – and which does not understand the complexities of human relationships and which demeans everything which is liberal and progressive to something which is rotten and horrible.
Image Courtesy: The Telegraph
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