Some interesting tidbits on the personal life of Narendra Modi

Guest Tue May 13, 2014 5:44 am

Given that by most calculations Narendra Modi will be holding the reins of power in Delhi in a fortnight’s time, it is surprising how few people here, outside a small inner circle of diehard sycophants, know the man at all. He has avoided Delhi for most of his life, and his team – with a few exceptions such as the dark legal genius of the BJP, Arun Jaitley, who is running in Amritsar – are largely those with whom he has worked in Gujarat.

Even in that small circle, few feel intimate with their idol, and what they tell you about his personal life adds to the sense of the man’s extreme austerity, self-discipline and self-sufficiency. “He is teetotal and vegetarian and lives an almost monastic lifestyle,” one told me. “He is extremely focused. When he talks to you he really listens: he can focus like few people I know.” “He calls it a day by eleven and gets up at four in the morning,” another aide said. “He spends the first 90 minutes of the day happily surfing the internet for articles about himself. His staff start getting calls by 5.30, latest.” “He is obsessed with personal hygiene,” said a third. “He changes his clothes at least four or five times a day. And he always eats alone. Always.”

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/05/narendra-modi-man-masses?utm_content=buffercbbcc&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Guest Tue May 13, 2014 6:10 am

Modi took office on 7 October 2001. He had been chief minister only four months when, on 27 February, a party of Hindutva activists, returning from Ayodhya, where they had been holding a tenth-anniversary celebration of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, were caught in a burning wagon as their train stopped in Godhra station. Fifty-nine people were burned to death. A subsequent investigation found that the fire started by accident, due to a malfunctioning gas cylinder, but Modi, without evidence, immediately announced that it was a Pakistani-Muslim conspiracy. He called a statewide strike and had the burned bodies of the Hindutva activists paraded around Ahmedabad while he made a series of incendiary speeches.

***

The following day, a huge mob of Hindu militants, armed with petrol bombs, iron rods and swords, gathered outside the Gulbarg Society, a residential complex in an upper-class Muslim area, home to a former Congress MP, Ehsan Jafri. Seeing that the police were observing the mob but making no attempt to control or disperse it, Jafri began calling round his contacts and begging for help. According to several survivors, Modi was among those he called. “After calling Modi, Jafri was totally depressed,” Imtiyaz Pathan, an electrician who had taken refuge in the house, told the Independent. “When I asked him what had happened, he said, ‘There will be no deployment of police.’ ” According to Jafri’s widow, Zakia, Modi taunted her husband and expressed surprise that he was still alive.

Shortly afterwards, at around 3pm, Zakia Jafri watched in horror from her balcony as rioters marched her naked husband from their home and chopped off his fingers, hands, arms and head, then tossed the body on an open pyre. All the while the police looked on without intervening, telling victims, “We have no orders to save you.” An investigative magazine later caught several ringleaders on camera claiming that the chief minister had approved the attacks: “Modi had given us three days to do whatever we could,” one of them boasted.

What happened in Gulbarg that day lies at the heart of the accusations against Modi. He denies all knowledge of events there and claims that he was not informed until 8.30pm, five hours after the massacre had finished. This version of events has been accepted by the Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team, which examined the matter at length. However, there are clear contradictions in the SIT report that make it hard to accept: for instance, records of a flurry of communications during the afternoon, as the violence unfolded, between police officers present in Gulbarg and their superiors. The SIT report praises Modi for holding a series of meetings with police officers throughout the day. If he was being briefed hour by hour, how then could he not have known about Gulbarg until late that evening? As a result, the report has been much criticised, especially since a former associate of Modi’s took out an affidavit claiming that a draft of the report had been sent to the Gujarat state lawyers for vetting and possible redrafting.

A Supreme Court-appointed independent legal witness, or amicus curiae, believes there is still enough evidence to put Modi on trial, and an earlier Supreme Court statement called him “a modern-day Nero”.

In the meantime, the case, including a new challenge from Zakia Jafri, continues to work its way through the legal system and there has not yet been a final ruling. But it is not true, as is often stated by Modi’s supporters, that the Supreme Court has given him a “clean chit”. In reality, the court has yet to rule on the matter; the facts remain in dispute and the case is ongoing.

Some interesting tidbits on the personal life of Narendra Modi

Some interesting tidbits on the personal life of Narendra Modi

Re: Some interesting tidbits on the personal life of Narendra Modi