Alva Myrdal

Pages 389-390

“…Alva’s UNESCO duties brought her to India in December 1952, where she met India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, at a UNESCO conference about Gandhi. Alva and Nehru would become close in the following years. In their first encounter, she managed to startle the notoriously disengaged politician with an otherwise bland speech. She referred to UNESCO’s goals as Gandhian goals and made mention of the Gandhian call to conscience. The great Indian leader had apparently dozed off, as he sat listening to the usual procession of pleasant homilies that such events oblige. But when Alva said, with characteristic forthrightness, “And the truth must be the same,

in whatever circumstances one speaks it, whether it concerns Korea or Kashmir,” the great statesman of the subcontinent awoke with a start. Her reference did not offend Nehru in the least, though. He invited Alva to lunch the following day, and they would remain friends until his death on 27 May 1964. Alva later described their friendship as ‘an affectionate relationship that never became a relationship’. Speculation as to the exact nature of that relationship aside, Nehru’s framed picture accompanied Alva as she lay bedridden and dying more than three decades after they met…”