The photo was taken during Nehru’s visit to the USSR in 1955, not during his visit to the USA - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
September 24, 2019
A photo is being shared widely on social media with a claim that it was taken during Nehru’s visit to the USA in 1954. This photo is being shared in the context of Modi’s recent visit to the U.S. and the ‘Howdy Modi’ event. Let’s try to analyze the claim made in the post.
Photo taken during Nehru’s visit to the USA in 1954.
Fact: Photo was taken during Nehru’s visit to the USSR in 1955. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has also posted the same picture with a similar claim on his Twitter account but later clarified that the picture was forwarded to him and ‘is probably from a visit to the USSR and no the US’. (Archived Tweet).
I am told this picture (forwarded to me) probably is from a visit to the USSR and not the US. Even if so, it still doesn’t alter the message: the fact is that former PMs also enjoyed popularity abroad. When @narendramodi is honoured, @PMOIndia is honoured; respect is for India. https://t.co/9KQMcR0zTD
When the image in the post was run through the Yandex Reverse Image Search, the same photo was found in a website with the description, ‘The meeting of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi 1955, Russia, Chelyabinsk oblast, Magnitogorsk’ (translated from Russian). A user has also given the geo-location of the place in the comments below the photo. The two buildings in the background can be seen in the street view of the location – ‘28 Prospekt Pushkina, Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia’.
In an article (‘The Soviet land, 1955’) on the ‘Outlook Traveller’ website, it can be found that Nehru, along with his daughter Indira, has travelled to the USSR in June 1955 and the itinerary included ‘Magnitogorsk’. The article reads, ‘In June of that year our first PM Jawaharlal Nehru travelled to Moscow for his first official tour of the USSR (he had been once before in 1927 as an Indian National Congress delegate to the 10th anniversary celebration of the October Revolution). His daughter was with him and they began an epic itinerary from Moscow to Leningrad by way of Stalingrad, Crimea, Georgia, Ashkabad, Tashkent, Samarkand, the Altai Territory, Magnitogorsk, and Sverdlovsk.’ Other photos and more information about this visit can be found here and here.
To sum it up, the photo shared as taken during Nehru’s visit to the USA in 1954 is actually from his visit to the USSR in 1955.
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