Jewaharlal Nehru actually advised Richard Attenborough not to deify Gandhi , as that is what we have done in India and he was to great a man to be deified . Indians would find this ironic , since common perception is that the man who deified Gandhi and built a cult in his name was none other than Jawaharlal Nehru himself . He did this because it was mostly his connection to Gandhi that gave him and his family legitimacy to rule India for 55 out of 70 odd years since independence . Naturally , Gandhi had to be deified that glory rubbed off on the Nehru family . Nehru was an ambitious man who leveraged Gandhi ' s name for his own advancement while Gandhi was alive and even after he died . Gandhi met Nehru through his father , Motilal Nehru , and was much taken with the fiery young man who was just getting into the Home Rule movement . Gandhi would take Jawaharlal along when he went to meetings with senior staff in the Indian National Congress , and such was Gandhi ' s authority that people began to accept the new kid who had just returned to India after school in Britain , and had no prior history with the independence movement . In fact , such was Gandhi ' s influence that Nehru was appointed president of the Indian National Congress in 1929 , without even the benefit of an election , over the heads of much more senior members who had dedicated their lives to the movement . And not only did he become president , he used Gandhi ' s backing to kick out other leaders like Dr . Rajendra Prasad and Chakravarti Rajgopalachari , who disagreed with his socialistmarxist ideals . And while Sardar Patel was too powerful to kick , even he backed out rather than risk offending Gandhi by squabbling with his favorite protg . Many Indians see Nehru ' s entire career as a process of leveraging Gandhi ' s name and reputation to solidify his own position as true heir to the independence struggle , the INC that fought for it , and the whole concept of Gandhivada . Naturally it was in his interest to deify Gandhi , because it ' s the public ' s reverence for Gandhi that rubbed off on him . Nehru and the Congress Party certainly used Gandhi symbolism quite shamelessly during their decades of rule from twin portraits of NehruGandhi at every government office , to declaring Gandhi ' s birthday a national holiday , to officially assigning him the status Father of the Nation , to countless roads , buildings and statuary erected in his name . If there ' s anyone who ever made a cult out of Gandhi , it was Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru . Public perception of Gandhi in India would have been very different without the relentless deification from the Nehru family .