Nehru only Indian PM tobe greeted on arrival at airport by US Prez: Tharoor

PTI, Sep 25, 2019, 10:20 AM IST

New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru remains the only Indian Prime Minister to be greeted on arrival at the airport by a US President, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said on Wednesday after the ‘Twitter kerfuffle” over his posting of photographs of the former Indian premier.

Tharoor had found himself in a spot of Twitter trouble when he posted a picture of Nehru and Indira Gandhi in what he claimed was the US only to clarify later that it was probably from their visit to the USSR.

The Congress leader, who had tweeted the photograph of the first prime minister and his daughter in an open vehicle waving to large crowds of people, was also trolled for misspelling Indira Gandhi’s name as “India Gandhi”.

In a bid to put a lid over the Twitter talk, Tharoor on Tuesday night posted two “authenticated” photographs saying, “After the Twitter kerfuffle about a mislabelled photograph, here’s an authenticated pair of pix from our PM’s visit to the US in 1949: a large crowd of people gathers at the University of Wisconsin to listen to a speech by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in November 1949.”

In another tweet a few hours later, he said: “Jawaharlal Nehru remains the only Indian Prime Minister to be greeted on arrival at the airport by a US President & it happened twice: President Harry S Truman in 1949 and President John F Kennedy in 1961 both received him off the plane.