India’s first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru breathed his last on May 27, 1964. In these 57 years, much has been written and spoken about Nehru’s legacies, ideologies, contributions towards making India a modern and thriving nation, etc. However, there were many controversies surrounding the Congress leader’s political as well as personal life, which have been far less spoken about.

Here are a few theories and facts related to the life of the first Prime Minister of India that has surfaced time and again on the webspace.

The death of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and claims of him suffering from syphilis

If one searches the internet, multiple reports can be found declaring that Pandit Nehru suffered a heart stroke on the morning of May 27, 1964, and fell unconscious and soon passed away without having regained consciousness. A report by New York Times, had then, in medical terms, described the reason for Nehru’s death as coronary thrombosis.

Coronary thrombosis is defined as the formation of a blood clot inside a blood vessel of the heart. This blood clot may then restrict blood flow within the heart, leading to heart tissue damage, or a myocardial infarction, also known as a heart attack.

A report by The Guardian had quoted a family member of Pandit Nehru as saying that the cause of his death was internal hemorrhage, paralytic stroke and a heart attack. Likewise, many other media reports had confirmed the reason for Nehru’s death to be a heart attack.

Despite media declaring that Nehru died of a heart attack, there has been another theory that states Nehru was a womaniser and died because of Syphilis, a sexually transmitted infection (STI). Though there is no evidence of how far this theory is true, people have often argued that in case this claim is untrue then why hasn’t Congress ever refuted these accusations or publicly spoken about Nehru’s illnesses.

According to the information present on the public forum, Nehru’s health started to deteriorate in the year 1962, post which, he spent months recuperating in Kashmir through 1963. Some historians attribute this dramatic decline of his health to India’s defeat in the Sino-Indian War, which he perceived as a betrayal of trust.

Upon his return from Dehradun on 26 May 1964 he was feeling quite comfortable and went to bed at about 11:30 pm, as usual. At around 6:30 am after he returned from the bathroom, Nehru complained of pain in the back. He spoke to the doctors who attended on him for a brief while and almost immediately Nehru collapsed. He remained unconscious until he died. His death was announced to Lok Sabha at 2 pm on May 27, 1964 (same day) and the cause of death was said to be a heart attack.

After Nehru’s death, some pro-Nehru supporters came up with several articles trying to dispel this hypothesis. However, in the last few decades, this belief has been debated and discussed quite significantly.

Claims about Edwina Mountbatten and Nehru’s relationship

Don’t know if you have heard about this or not, but in the year 2017, a man named Rajiv Dixit made shocking claims about Nehru, Mohammad Jinnah, and the last Viceroy of India Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina Mountbatten in one of his YouTube videos. He had claimed that Edwina had an affair with both Nehru and Jinnah. He furthered that Lady Mountbatten had blackmailed Nehru into signing the papers for the partition since she had some pictures as evidence of the affairs. Though there is no evidence about Rajiv Dixit’s hypothesis, it is true that due to Lady Mountbatten, a lot of fingers were raised on Pandit Nehru’s character.

Over the years, a lot has been spoken about the love affair between the two, which lasted until Edwina died. There is also a series on Netflix titled The Crown that talks about their relationship.

In fact, Edwina’s daughter Pamela had also accepted that her mother and Nehru were in a relationship. Though describing the relationship as completely plutonic, Pamela had written 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.

In fact, it was this rumour of Pandit Nehru’s affair with Lady Mountbatten which fuelled speculations that Jawaharlal Nehru died of a sexually transmitted infection..

A Twitter user named Dr Vedika had in 2019, posted a Tweet in which she had pointed out the similarity between the circumstance in which Nehru, as well as Lady Mountbatten, died. Drawing equivalences, Dr Vedika wrote that both Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten had died of a heart attack and both had multiple love affairs in their lives.

The relationship between the two was out in open even when the two were alive. The Late author Khuswant Singh in his book “ Truth love and a little malice” talks of one such incident when Nehru visited England for the first time as the Prime minister of India , The Daily telegraph had a photograph of Nehru at the Mountbatten’s door and Edwina opening the door for him the caption under the photograph said “the late night visitor of Lady Mountbatten” the newspaper also claimed that Lord Mountbatten was out of the city when this happened.

Although he is accused of a lot of problems that India faces today and Nehru’s critics and opposition might never agree to this but for the British media and Anti Mountbatten lobbies the relationship between Dickey’s wife and the first prime minister of India was always seen as something which led the Lord to favor Nehru by going out of the way and the best example for this is Lord Mountbatten’s visit to Kashmir during the partition where he allegedly asked Maharaja Hari Singh to join India after Nehru asked him to do so.

It’s not like the talks and rumor mongering about the affair was only happening in England, it was always a hot topic for a certain section here in India as well but till the time Nehru was alive no newspaper or journalist must have dared to talk about it and even if the opposition made allegations about the affair the congress party and Nehruvians hypocritically refused to accept the relationship between the two.

For anyone who claims to be progressive should have accepted a relationship between two consenting adults who were mature enough to make decisions for themselves and if the congress party has refused it till now it’s because of their utter hypocrisy.

In a section titled "A Special Relationship" Pamela writes: "My mother had already had lovers. My father was inured to it. It broke his heart the first time, but it was somehow different with Nehru."

She quotes a letter which Lord Mountbatten wrote to her elder sister in June 1948 on the Edwina-Nehru relationship: "'She and Jawaharlal (sic) are so sweet together, they really dote on each other in the nicest way and Pammy and I are doing everything we can to be tactful and help. Mummy has been incredibly sweet lately and we've been such a happy family'."

So there existed a "happy three-some" based on firm understanding on all sides, writes Pamela, which strengthened during a trip to Mashobra.

Pamela, who thought Nehru spoke and wrote beautiful English, also quotes a letter written by Nehru to Edwina in March 1957: "Suddenly I realised (and perhaps you also did) that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force, of which I was dimly aware, drew us to one another, I was overwhelmed and at the same time exhilarated by this new discovery.

We talked more intimately as if some veil had been removed and we could look into each other's eyes without fear or embarrassment."

Edwina was 44 when she came to India in 1947 with Lord Mountbatten, who was to guide India to independence as the last Viceroy. Pamela, who was taken out of school to accompany her parents, spent the next 15 months recording the birth of two nations.

Describing her mother as an introvert she says that her parents worked well as a team. "My father trusted her decisions implicitly...And of course, her special relationship with Pandit Nehru was very useful for him ever the pragmatist -- because there were moments towards the end of our time in India when the Kashmir problem was extremely difficult.

In her tweet, Dr Vedika describes the cause of death of Nehru as Syphillitic Aortic Aneurysm and explains that the heart attack might have been the consequence of STD, as it is a common aftereffect.

Apart from this, there are many blogs on the internet, which suggest that Syphilitic aortic aneurysm was the reason behind Nehru’s death. At the same time, there are no clear reasons for Edwina’s death. It has been written that she died in bed.

Was Nehru also in a homosexual relationship with Louis Mountbatten?

Besides being in a relationship with Edwina, Nehru’s alleged homosexual relationship with Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of British India, has also been a topic of wide discussions. A 2009 article published in DailyMail states that Nehru liked both the husband-wife duo as some suspect that he had bisexual tendencies.

While there are only speculations of Jawaharlal Nehru being bisexual, there are many reports on the internet that affirm that Louis Mountbatten was a bisexual. In fact, a book on the lives of the Mountbattens- The Mountbattens: Their Lives & Loves, written by Andrew Lownie, claimed to have accessed files of the US FBI that reported Louis Mountbatten was himself bisexual and had a “fetish” for “beautiful boys in school uniform”.

Lownie’s book also quotes Ron Perks, Louis Mountbatten’s driver in Malta in 1948, as saying Louis Mountbatten used to frequent a “gay brothel used by senior naval officers” in Rabat, Morocco.

Speculations that Jawaharlal Nehru dies of AIDS

Amongst all these speculations behind the real reason for Nehru’s death, one is also that Nehru died of the Sexually Transmitted Disease AIDS. However, there is no significant proof behind these claims. For the uninitiated, the first known case of HIV-AIDS was diagnosed in 1986, two decades after Nehru’s death.

The first case in India was diagnosed by Dr Suniti Solomon and her student Dr Sellapan Nirmala in 1986, amongst the female sex workers in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Later that year, many cases of women suffering the deadly disease were detected.

While all these are speculations with no definite proof, these controversies that revolve around the life of the first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru cannot be ignored considering it keeps resurfacing on the internet and social media spaces time and again.