Nehru's relationship with Edwina 'sexual'?

New Delhi, July 17: Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's relationship with Edwina Mountbatten could have been 'sexual', concedes Lady Pamela Hicks, throwing an element of doubt in her assertion in a book that it was only 'platonic'.

Lady Pamela, Lord Mountbatten's youngest daughter, also reveals that her father used Edwina to influence Pandit Nehru's decision on Kashmir, including referring the issue to the UN.

In her just released book, 'India Remembered', Pamela maintained that the relationship between her mother and Pandit Nehru was 'platonic'.

When asked by Karan Thapar for CNN-IBN's 'Devil's Advocate' programme whether the relationship between her mother and Panditji could have been 'sexual', Lady Pamela replied: ''It could be and may be everybody will think I'm being very naive, but I don't believe it.'' In the first interview given by any member of the Mountbatten family on the relationship between Lady Mountbatten and Pandit Nehru, she, however, said:''I loved them both very much and I wasn't particularly interested if they were tumbling around in bed together.'' The interview, to be telecast on Sunday, is to mark the publication of her book 'India Remembered' about the 15 months she spent in the country from March 1947 to June 1948,.

To a query whether her father ever objected to the fact that people were joking about the Viceroy being 'cuckolded', she said: ''I thik it shows what confidence he had...I loved them both very much...'' She described it as ''a very deep love. The kind of love (like) that (of) the old knights of old, a chivalric love really. Nowadays people assume that it has to be a carnal love, but you can have just as deep an emotional love with two like souls.''

UNI