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Should take PM Modi’s word for this, says Shashi Tharoor. It isn’t a dig
Shashi Tharoor had credited India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru with creating institutional structures that made Narendra Modi’s spectacular rise from a tea seller possible.
Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, who is often seen taking swipes at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, spoke out in his defence on Friday. Tharoor, reacting to a news-report that there was no official record of PM Modi being a tea-seller at a railway station in his early years, said the country should just take Modi’s word for it.
“The fact that a person of humble origins has risen to the most powerful office in the land is a tribute to India’s democracy & something all Indians can be proud of. The details are irrelevant,” Shashi Tharoor, who had recently found himself at the centre of a controversy over Modi’s humble origins, tweeted on Friday.
Tharoor had then credited India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru with creating institutional structures that made Modi’s spectacular rise from a tea seller possible. That remark had given PM Modi enough ammo to fire a fresh attack on the Congress for crediting his victory to Nehru.
The BJP and PM Modi had first turned a comment made by the Congress’s Mani Shankar Aiyar deriding him for selling tea at Gujarat’s Vadnagar station into a key campaign point in the 2014 general elections. The BJP had pitched PM Modi as a self-made leader, contrasting his modest origins with the Congress’ Rahul Gandhi who, PM Modi emphasised, owed his position in the party to his last name.
It is a point that PM Modi continues to underline at his election meetings, referring to Rahul Gandhi as naamdaar (privileged) and himself, as kaamdar (working class).
Or when he travelled to Vadnagar last year, his home town in Gujarat nearly 100 km from Ahmedabad, an exhibition was held at the railway station where he once helped his father sell tea.
But the railways do not have any documentary evidence of a young Modi selling tea at the station and says as much to every right to information request that it receives. It was a news report based on a similar request that Tharoor had spotted on Twitter.
“I think we should take @narendramodi’s word for this,” he said.
