By Rishabh Raj
A viral video purporting to show India's first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru admitting in an interview that he never participated in India's fight for independence from the British, is altered and fake.
BOOM found that the audio of the clip has been tampered with by replacing the word 'Jinnah' with the word 'I'. In the original video Nehru said Jinnah referring to Pakistan's founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
In the viral clip, Nehru can be heard saying, "I was not involved in the fight for Independence at all. In fact, he opposed it. Muslim League was started in about 1911, I think. It was started really by the British, encouraged by them so as to create factions, they did succeed to some extent. And ultimately, there came the partition."
The clip has also been sub-titled with the same false transcript.
The video is being shared with a Hindi caption that translates to, "*_Some people still consider him a Pandit and consider him a patriot and hang his photo in their home. I was not at all involved in the freedom struggle. Rather, I had opposed it."_* - *_Nehrua *".
(Original Text in Hindi: *_कुछ लोग आज तक इसे पंडित मानते हैं और इसे देशभक्त मानकर इसका फोटो घर में लगाते हैं" मैं आज़ादी की लड़ाई में बिल्कुल भी शामिल नहीं था। बल्कि मैंने इसका विरोध किया था।"_* - *_नेहरूआ *)
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Bengal BJP state spokesperson Madhavi Agarwal also posted the video her verified X handle and wrote in Hindi, "Rare video....Guess who! "I was not involved in the freedom struggle at all. Rather, I opposed it.""
(Original Text in Hindi: दुर्लभ वीडियो…. पहचानिए कौन ! "मैं आज़ादी की लड़ाई में बिल्कुल भी शामिल नहीं था। बल्कि मैंने इसका विरोध किया था।")
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Fact Check
BOOM found that the video has been doctored by altering the Nehru's audio. The word 'Jinnah' has been replaced with the word 'I'. In addition, a false transcript has also been added to the video to bolster the false claim.
We took a screenshot from the video and ran a reverse image search and found the full interview on Prasar Bharati's official YouTube channel.
The interview, uploaded on May 14, 2019, shows Jawaharlal Nehru speaking to American TV host Arnold Michaels in May 1964. It aired in New York on May 18, 1964, just days before Nehru's death on May 27, 1964.
The viral segment circulating on social media appears at the 14:30 mark in the YouTube video. In the interview, Arnold Michaels asks Nehru, “Well... now… you, and Mr Gandhi and Mr Jinnah, you were all involved at that point… before the point of independence and partition, in the fight for independence of India from British domination.”
In response to the question, Nehru said, "Mr. Jinnah was not involved in the fight for Independence at all. In fact, he opposed it. The Muslim League was started in about 1911, I think. It was started really by the British, encouraged by them so as to create factions in our ends, they did succeed to some extent. Then ultimately, there came the partition.
The original interview makes it clear that Nehru was speaking about Mohammed Ali Jinnah - the founder of Pakistan, and not himself.
After Nehru's answer, Arnold Michaels further asked him, "Had you and Mr Gandhi been in favour of that?"
Nehru replied, "Mr Gandhi was not in favour of it right to the end. Even when it came, he was not in favour of it. I was not in favour of it either. But ultimately, I decided like others did, many others, that it is better to have a partition than this constant …trouble... and you see the leaders of the Muslim league, who were big landlords at that time, who did not like land reform... We were very anxious to have land reform, which we did have afterwards, and that was one reason, we agreed to partition... because we thought that if they remain with us, apart from this trouble continuing, they would oppose our measures, many of our measures... and we said it's better to have a part of India and go ahead with our programs of reforms, etc., than to be tied up with those leaders who would come in the way of these reforms."
We also found the same interview on the Facebook page of the Nehru Centre for Social Research, where it was shared on December 1, 2021.
Both the original YouTube video and the video uploaded to Nehru Centre for Social Research's Facebook page have no transcript embedded in the video. This suggests that whoever has tampered the audio also added a false transcript to the clip.
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