Viral Test: Did Pandit Nehru give interview to Playboy?

Just recently, social media exploded with claims that Playboy had confirmed that the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave an interview to the adult magazine 55 years ago. Yes, such a claim is being made on social media attributing to a publication that overturned the world's puritanical moral code.

It all began with a tweet from a handle, Maithun (24°C) (@Being_Humor). The post went viral. "Congress has got this tweet deleted," wrote Maithun (24°C) adding, "Can you all share it as much as you can."

This post appended below an alleged Playboy tweet that read "PB Fact: The first Head of state interviewed by Playboy was Jawsharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. It was conducted in 1963."

Claim that Pandit Nehru gave interview to adult magazine Playboy is doing rounds on social media.

Our Viral Test team then examined this claim, made on October 12, 2017, with attention to detail.

We searched @Playboy's timeline thoroughly, which has 1.43 million followers, but we found no tweet about the Nehru interview. It could not be ascertained whether any such tweet ever existed and later deleted by the handle.

We also found out that the font of the text in Maithun (24°C)'s tweet was different from the one used by Twitter. Also noticeable is a glaring error -- Jawaharlal Nehru was typed as "Jawsharlal" in Maithun (24°C)'s claims attributed to @Playboy.

Now coming to the moot question: Did Playboy interview Jawaharlal Nehru?

We came across a detailed article on www.forbes.com published on October 3, 2017 by Ronak D Desai. This write-up says that an interview of Jawaharlal Nehru was indeed published in the Playboy magazine in its October edition of 1963 as part of interview series which the magazine had started a year before.

We accessed the archives. Playboy's cover of October 1963, which featured blonde model Elsa Martinelli with a mischievous smile, did declare, "AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH NEHRU OF INDIA".

Inside the copy, a detailed "interview" of Jawaharlal Nehru runs into several pages.

In the beginning, the magazine claims that "Prime Minister Nehru granted the following exclusive interview on the hibiscus-scented grounds of his home at 10 Tin Murti Marg, New Delhi."

The article does not identify the interviewer, but it has mentioned, "Playboy interview by Henry Slesar" with the cover photo in the beginning. Henry Slesar was an American playwright, author and copywriter who died in 2002.

The claimed Playboy interview of Pandit Nehru published in 1963.

The interview states "Nehru has spoken" on a range of issues from Mahatma Gandhi, Tagore and the Chinese aggression to the non-aligned movement. If there is such a solid documentary evidence of Nehru's interview, what is then the dispute over the issue?

The answer lies in an editor's note on page 3 of the same edition, which carries a disclaimer by the Indian embassy.

It states "after the rest of the magazine had gone to press, we received word from the Indian Embassy in Washington that our interview with PM Nehru was not, in fact, the result of an exclusive, personal conversation with the head of the Indian state, but simply a gathering together of public pronouncements made by the prime minister in various speeches, statements, etc, over the past several years."

Now that effectively means that, according to Indian embassy, Nehru never granted any interview to Playboy and that the so-called interviewer had just gathered information and statements of Nehru already available on public domain.

They were probably woven in the form of an interview and handed over to the adult magazine.

Playboy, however, also claimed in the same editor's note that "the Nehru material was submitted to us by a well-regarded journalist-publisher, who has previously conducted numerous similar interviews with famous personages all over the world; it was sold as an actual interview, recorded on tape, and the covering letters that so described the material also included photographs of the prime minister and journalist together."

"There was no reason to doubt its validity and we consequently published it in good faith as a personal interview."

Thanks to the half-century old controversy, the October 1963 edition of Playboy remains much sought after even today. But whether or not Nehru actually gave the interview to Playboy remains an unsettled dispute.