Dear Mr Narendra Modi,

After I reached this place on May 27, 1964, I have generally kept away from writing letters. Old habits, however, die hard. My daughter is here, and so are my grandsons. None of us knows you personally, but we often discuss your tenure as Prime Minister because you happen to be one of our successors in a long line of occupants of a rather demanding office.

I was delighted to learn that you completed 4,399 days as Prime Minister on June 10, 2026. Since you appear to be in excellent health and full of energy, you may even aspire to surpass the record of your friend Vladimir Putin of Russia, who has served either as President or Prime Minister since August 9, 1999. Please accept my heartiest congratulations on this milestone.

I often wonder, however, whether comparisons between you and me are entirely in order. When I died in 1964, life expectancy in India was around 42 years. Yet I managed to live up to 74. Today, life expectancy in India is close to 72 years. By that standard, you may well cross the age of 100 and leave me far behind in every comparison.

You are already older than I ever became while serving as Prime Minister, having turned 75 on September 17, 2025.

I confess to having a certain admiration for you. As you have often remarked, I was born with what people call a silver spoon in my mouth. I grew up hearing stories that my dirty linen was sent to Paris for washing. My father, Motilal Nehru, was born on the same day, the same month and the same year as Rabindranath Tagore—May 6, 1861.

My father earned enormous wealth and could have accumulated much more had he chosen to do so. Instead, he abandoned comfort to join the freedom struggle. He was arrested twice, the second time along with me during the Civil Disobedience Movement. He spent a total of seven months in prison and was released early each time because of failing health. In fact, he died shortly after his final release from jail.

I succeeded him as President of the Indian National Congress. My greatest strength in those years was the support of Mahatma Gandhi. I can say without fear of contradiction that I was dearer to him than his own sons. It was Gandhi's support that helped me become Vice-President of the Executive Council in 1946, the body over which the Viceroy presided.

Before that, I had spent nearly nine years in prison. Since you were born after Independence, you had no occasion to go to jail in the freedom struggle. It remains a mystery to me, however, how you escaped arrest during the Emergency that my thoughtless daughter imposed upon the nation. Whatever the reason, I shall not hold it against you.

I would like to disabuse you of the belief that the Prime Ministership of 1947 resembled the Prime Ministership of 2014. Except for railway lines, the postal and telegraph systems, and cantonments established by the British, there was very little that could be called national infrastructure. Starvation deaths were not uncommon. There was scarcely any private sector worth the name.

Partition had left us with impossible tasks. Punjab had lost Lahore. We needed a new capital, as far from the border as possible. Thus emerged Chandigarh, then little more than a mango grove. I had to write personally to Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect, requesting him to build it. I informed him frankly that India was too poor to pay his fees. We could offer him a house, a car and staff, but not much else. He agreed.

I did not coin the phrase "Made in India," but we tried to make India capable of making things. I was happy that you borrowed my words ànd said you are Pradhan Sevak.

Our foremost task was nation-building. Democratic institutions had to be imagined, created and nurtured under the Constitution. An independent Election Commission was constituted to conduct the first general election. Sukumar Sen, then Chief Secretary of West Bengal, was chosen to head this enormous enterprise.

There were 176 million eligible voters, of whom nearly 85 per cent could neither read nor write. Every voter had to be identified and registered. Ballot boxes had to be manufactured. Polling booths had to be established. Election symbols had to be devised.

Sen conducted not one but two remarkable elections—in 1952 and 1957. His youngest brother, Amiya Sen, happened to be the doctor who attended Rabindranath Tagore in his final hours. Before Tagore died, he dictated a poem that Amiya wrote down by hand.

No, I did not grant Sukumar Sen immunity from civil or criminal proceedings. After retirement, he served quietly as a Vice-Chancellor.

I was luckier than you in another respect. Because of my role in the freedom movement, winning elections came more easily. I seldom visited temples, mosques or churches, and yet people trusted me enough to vote for me.

In 1952, the Congress won 364 of 489 seats with 44.99 per cent of the vote. In 1957, it secured 371 of 494 seats with 47.78 per cent. In 1962, my final election, the party won 361 of 494 seats with 44.77 per cent.

It would be ungenerous of me to mention the seats your party won or the percentages it secured.

Yet I can imagine how you must have felt when the early trends from Varanasi in 2024 showed you trailing behind the Congress candidate. Or when your party managed only a solitary seat in Tamil Nadu despite an alliance with the AIADMK.

I preferred to build what I once called the modern temples of India, such as the Bhakra-Nangal Dam and the Hirakud Dam. They were symbols of a people determined to conquer hunger, flood and drought through science and collective effort.

I was amused when someone here informed me that you took the Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, to Varanasi to witness the grand Ganga Aarti. I remember taking the Chinese Premier, Zhou En-lai, to Punjab to show him the Bhakra-Nangal Dam. Perhaps both gestures reflected the temper of our respective times. History, I suppose, has room for both spectacles.

Technology has allowed you to conduct Mann Ki Baat and carry your voice to every nook and cranny of India. I had to rely on letters. Prison might have provided me with leisure, but I chose to use it to write. During my incarcerations, I produced books because writing was my way of conversing with my countrymen.

Even as Prime Minister, I wrote regularly to Chief Ministers because I believed that a federal democracy required conversation, persuasion and explanation.

Permit me to recall what I wrote in the very first of those letters on October 15, 1947:

"We have a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want to, go anywhere else. They have got to live in India. This is a basic fact about which there can be no argument.. We must give them security and the right of citizens in a democratic state."

Nearly eight decades later, I still regard those words as relevant.

I understand that you do not write letters to Chief Ministers. You have X and other social media platforms through which you can communicate directly with people. I am also informed that your book, Exam Warriors, has become a considerable success among young readers. I could not write books while holding office.

Unlike you, every public speech I delivered required preparation. I had to study the subject, make notes, revise drafts and then deliver the address. You have the advantage of the teleprompter.

I know little about this remarkable device, but I am told that it relieves a speaker of the burden of memorisation. The Prime Minister's Office in my time was skeletal. It could not possibly have prepared speeches of the kind delivered today, nor projected them before me on a transparent screen.

Perhaps the teleprompter also saves time that may be devoted to planning and executing bold initiatives such as demonetisation. We had no such conveniences.

Travel itself was an ordeal in my day. There were no direct flights to many destinations. Journeys to the United States involved multiple stops, long waits at unfamiliar airports and endless fatigue. Today, you possess aircraft capable of carrying you across continents within hours. I am told that one can fly from New Delhi to New York in about fourteen hours.

I do not blame you for avoiding press conferences. You possess social media platforms through which you can communicate with the world without interruption or inconvenient questions. I, on the other hand, had to meet journalists, answer queries and subject myself to press conferences with all their unpredictability.

One criticism often directed at me is that I devoted insufficient attention to primary education while establishing institutions such as the IITs and AIIMS. There is some truth in that criticism.

I erred in leaving school education largely to the states. I promoted scholarship schemes for meritorious students from modest backgrounds. You have preferred a different path, inviting children from across the country to interact with you each year at public expense.

My language, I admit, was less imaginative. I described districts lagging behind in development as "backward districts." You call them "aspirational districts." It is a gentler phrase and perhaps a wiser one. Hope often motivates better than pity.

Unlike you, I had to deal with colleagues of formidable intellect and independent temperament. Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee disagreed with me and resigned. Dr BR Ambedkar left my Cabinet. CD Deshmukh departed after differences. John Mathai walked away. Lal Bahadur Shastri occasionally disagreed with me without fear. He resigned, owning responsibility for a train accident.

I am happy that none of your ministers appears to criticise you publicly. I also heard what happened to Jagdeep Dhankhar when he appeared to assume that, as Vice-President, he occupied an authority independent of the Prime Minister. The management of ambition has evidently become more efficient over time.

I admire your wardrobe. Indeed, I sometimes feel that you do not merely wear clothes; you curate costumes.

In my day, one wore a garment until necessity compelled its replacement. In the sweltering Indian heat, freshness was difficult to maintain. Winter permitted a little elegance. I should genuinely like to know how you manage to appear in attire so varied and meticulously arranged.

I do not know much about spirituality. I was an agnostic and remained sceptical of ritual observance. You frequently visit temples, receive prasad and participate in religious ceremonies with evident devotion. Is that the secret of your extraordinary energy and youthful appearance as you approach your seventy-seventh year?

I know that it is a myth that the Great Wall of China is visible from the moon. Human eyesight would have to be many thousands of times stronger for that to be possible.

I cannot say the same with certainty about the Statue of Unity that you built in honour of Sardar Patel. I am told repeatedly that Patel and I were adversaries. The truth is more complex.

He was older than I was. He possessed a different temperament and a different set of instincts. We argued, disagreed, and occasionally exasperated one another. Yet none of that prevented us from working together in the service of a newly independent nation.

He became Home Minister at the age of 71 and died in 1950. His passing was a grievous loss to me personally and to the country politically. We had differences of opinion, but we also had respect for one another. Public life today could perhaps benefit from remembering that disagreement need not extinguish affection, and rivalry need not eliminate civility.

As I conclude this letter, let me once again congratulate you on your remarkable tenure.

Every Prime Minister inherits an India shaped by predecessors and leaves behind an India altered by his own choices. You inherited a country immeasurably stronger, wealthier and more confident than the one entrusted to me in 1947.

Continue to serve India according to your convictions, but remember that institutions are more enduring than individuals, dissent is not disloyalty, majorities are not permanent, and the true test of power lies in the manner in which it treats those who disagree with it.

With warm regards from a place where election results no longer matter and where reputations are revised with regularity,

Yours sincerely,
Jawaharlal Nehru