New Delhi, Oct. 30: The BJP today said Jawaharlal Nehru did not attend Rajendra Prasad’s funeral, wading into a fresh historical row.

“Nehru did not go to Rajendra Babu’s funeral,” BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said at a news conference today. Rajendra Prasad, who was India’s first President, died in February 1963.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, who like Rajendra Prasad is from Bihar, recalled that as a boy he had attended the funeral but did not see Nehru.

“He came later for a condolence meeting,” added the BJP spokesperson, who belongs to a family of Jan Sangh leaders.

His comments came after a tweet by Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi saying a statement about Nehru not attending Patel’s funeral had been “wrongly” attributed to him.

The Gujarat paper that published an interview containing the statement has since said no such interview was given to its reporter. After the purported statement appeared, several photos showing Nehru at Patel’s funeral have been doing the rounds.

Ravi Shankar Prasad’s claims threatened to add to the spat over Patel with the Congress and coincided with the Sangh’s perceived bid to show that Nehru was not quite the supreme nationalist in a pantheon that included Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Subhas Chandra Bose.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had told a meeting where Modi was present that Sardar Patel was secular to the core.

According to Ravi Shankar Prasad, incumbent President S. Radhakrishnan and Nehru’s cabinet colleague Lal Bahadur Shastri had come to Patna for Rajendra Prasad’s funeral, although he claimed Nehru had disapproved of Radhakrishnan’s presence.

In two separate books, historians Jagdish Chandra Sharma, and co-authors K. Satchidananda Murty and Ashok Vohra, have said Nehru was preparing to leave for Rajasthan to collect money for the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund for a famine and wrote to Radhakrishnan expressing inability to attend the funeral.

Nehru advised Radhakrishnan not to go to Patna, Murty and Vohra have said in their book. According to the book, Radhakrishnan tried to persuade Nehru to accompany him but when that failed, he ignored Nehru’s advice and went ahead.

Ravi Shankar Prasad — who did not mention the books — gave no reason for raking up the controversial nugget now. But BJP sources said the aim was to ruffle Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar.

Suspecting Nitish to be cosying up to the Congress and the Gandhis, the BJP hoped to cite Nehru’s alleged “slight” to Rajendra Prasad as another instance of how the family treated other icons.