Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's First TV Interview
Jawaharlal Nehru, left, and Mahatma Gandhi
December 2, 2023
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, was one of the leaders of India’s struggle for freedom from British rule. He was jailed for 16 years by the British. In 1953, in a BBC interview, he was asked why there is so little resentment in India towards the British. Nehru said Indians don’t hate “for long or intensively,” a perspective popularized by Mahatma Gandhi, leader of India’s fight for independence.
Nehru was Prime Minister from 1947 to 1964. He played a key role in establishing parliamentary democracy in the country. He was also the architect of India’s neutral – nonaligned - policies in foreign affairs, between the two post World War 2 superpowers the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. He got the government to set up the Indian Institures of Technology, whose graduates include Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet, parent of Google, and Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM.
The BBC interview was Nehru’s first television interview. It is now available online as part of the archives of BBC News India.
Seven years after India’s independence, among India’s achievements, Nehru told the BBC, was “we have built a good democratic structure.” Nehru said he was troubled that the country’s economic progress was not much faster.
Since 2014, after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) assumed power under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Nehru’s legacy has come under sustained attack. Modi’s “government finds it politically expedient to demonize Nehru in the public sphere while it enacts policies that shake the very foundations of the Indian state,” wrote Sumit Ganguly in Foreign Policy in July. A visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Ganguly was reviewing a book on Nehru.
Nehru began the interview by praising the people of London for their fortitude and ”insistence on enjoying themselves” even in bad weather. Nehru was interviewed at the BBC studio in London by HV Hodson, editor of The Sunday Times, Donald McLaughlin, foreign editor of The Economist and Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman.
