[The acknowledgment caused a minor furor in India’s parliamentary
elections in which voting began Monday and is being held on nine different days
over six weeks, ending in May. Somabhai Damodardas Modi, Mr. Modi’s eldest
brother, released a statement on Thursday saying his brother’s marriage “was a
mere formality.”]
By Gardiner Harris
 |
Credit Diptendu Dutta/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Supporters of the Bharatiya
Janata Party held masks of Narendra Modi during a
party rally on Thursday in
Siliguri, India.
|
It was Mr. Modi’s first official acknowledgment of a marriage
that he abandoned 45 years ago, just weeks after the wedding. Mr. Modi, a
leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, had previously left blank official
questionnaires asking him to list his marital status. But in what is perhaps a
lingering sign of ambivalence, Mr. Modi listed only his wife’s first name —
Jashodaben. She was born Jashodaben Chimanlal but now goes by Jashodaben
Chimanlal Modi.
The acknowledgment caused a minor furor in India’s parliamentary
elections in which voting began Monday and is being held on nine different days
over six weeks, ending in May. Somabhai Damodardas Modi, Mr. Modi’s eldest
brother, released a statement on Thursday saying his brother’s marriage “was a
mere formality.”
“Since working for the nation was the only dream that
Narendrabhai had, he left all worldly pleasures and left home,” his statement
read.
Mr. Modi’s rivals quickly seized on the admission. Digvijaya
Singh, of the Indian National Congress party, asked if a man who hid his
marriage could be trusted.
“He is betraying the people of this country in every way,” Mr.
Singh said. “This person is mentally against women.”
Political analysts debated whether the acknowledgment might
affect voting by women, who rarely appear at campaign rallies but whose role in
the elections is seen as critical.
In campaign speeches, Mr. Modi has touted his single status as a
sign that he would be corruption-free as prime minister, since he has no close
family to support.
But stories about Mr. Modi have long noted
that he was married when he was 17, after being betrothed by his parents when
he was just 3. He abandoned the marriage just weeks after the ceremony and
disappeared for two years, later telling his family that he had been wandering
in the Himalayas.
For years, reporters have trooped to the tiny village in Gujarat
where Ms. Modi worked as a primary schoolteacher, hoping to interview her. Most
have said that Ms. Modi was supportive of her husband but hesitant to answer
questions, and some reported being asked to leave by local
officials.
Darshan Desai, then a reporter for The Indian Express, was among
the first to find her, in 2002 soon after riots in Gujarat,
where Mr. Modi is chief minister. The riots killed more than 1,000 people and
made Mr. Modi a controversial national figure.
Mr. Desai found Ms. Modi living
in a one-room apartment with no toilet or bath and a monthly rent of 100 rupees,
now equivalent to about $1.66. He said the school where she taught had a
largely Muslim student body, remarkable because Mr. Modi leads a Hindu
nationalist party and has fraught relations with Muslims following the 2002
riots whose toll fell heaviest on Muslims.
Mr. Desai said he had to jump into a moving car to escape a
village mob angry that he was searching for Ms. Modi, and he said Mr. Modi
called him within minutes of his returning home and asked, “What is your
agenda?”
Ravinder Kaur, a professor of sociology at the Indian Institute
of Technology, Delhi, said that teenage boys occasionally abandoned marriages
arranged for them.
“It doesn’t get talked about much because families usually
quietly rearrange things, but this kind of thing does happen,” Ms. Kaur said.
“Hindu culture respects people like him, who are known as sannyasa, or
renouncers.”
@ The New York Times
IN VILLAGES TORN BY VIOLENCE, TRADITIONAL LOYALTIES AT RISK
IN VILLAGES TORN BY VIOLENCE, TRADITIONAL LOYALTIES AT RISK
[The Hindus interviewed for
this article Thursday, while not a statistically representative sample, said
they had voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party, in many cases for the first
time. The Muslims said that they had selected either the Samajwadi Party, which
runs the state government and has traditionally courted the Muslim vote, or the
Bahujan Samaj Party, which taps the votes of the lower-caste communities.]
By Betwa Sharma
FUGANA, India — Sakur Ahmed, an ironsmith, is a member of the only Muslim
family left in the village of Fugana, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh,
where violence between Muslims and Hindu Jats erupted in September. When Muslims
fled the village, Mr. Ahmed, protected by a Hindu neighbor, chose to stay.
When he cast his ballot in the national election on Thursday,
Mr. Ahmed, 60, endorsed the Samajwadi Party, saying that it had helped
displaced Muslims by setting up camps and by providing them with compensation
for damages.
The rest of the village
voted overwhelmingly Thursday for the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is seen as
sympathetic to Hindus. “They voted for whom they like, and I was free to make
my choice,” he said. “There is no tension between us.”
Muslims and Hindu Jats in the Muzaffarnagar district, where the
riots erupted, had lived together for many decades, and politics had
traditionally been centered on caste and clan loyalties.
But since this sugar cane belt was torn by the violence last
year that killed at least 60 people and displaced more than 50,000 Muslims,
political analysts said that votes in the region could become polarized along
religious lines.
The Hindus interviewed for this article Thursday, while not a
statistically representative sample, said they had voted for the Bharatiya
Janata Party, in many cases for the first time. The Muslims said that they had
selected either the Samajwadi Party, which runs the state government and has
traditionally courted the Muslim vote, or the Bahujan Samaj Party, which taps
the votes of the lower-caste communities.
In the villages hit by the riots, voting was conducted
peacefully on Thursday, albeit amid heavy security. Men and women made their
way to polling stations set up in government schools, which were patrolled by
the police and by paramilitary forces.
The women, who generally arrived in groups to vote, left the
polling stations quietly, chattering among themselves. The men loudly defended
their political choices, but the discussions often devolved into arguments
about who had been responsible for the religious violence.
The major concerns for many Hindu Jats are the criminal charges
that were filed against nearly 250 Jats after last year’s violence. Many Hindu
Jats accuse the Samajwadi Party, or S.P., of carrying out biased investigations
and contend that the charges are groundless.
For this reason, several Hindu Jats in the villages said that
they had traded their former loyalty to the Rashtriya Lok Dal, which is in an
alliance with the governing Congress party, in favor of the Bharatiya Janata
Party.
“The B.J.P. will be able to stop the S.P. or at least hold an
independent inquiry into what really happened here,” said Rajkumar Malik, 53.
Some also said they voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party because
they want to see Narendra Modi, the party’s candidate for prime minister,
become India’s next leader.
Vidya Devi, 80, who voted
for the Rashtriya Lok Dal in the 2009 elections, said she had recently become a
supporter of Mr. Modi’s because he seemed like a man who could take charge. “I
don’t have too much time to live,” she said. “I want to vote for someone who
can protect country, the community and my children.”
Manoj Malik, head of Kharad village, which is close to Fugana,
said that all the Hindus living there had turned to the Bharatiya Janata Party
and away from the Rashtriya Lok Dal.
“We are all Modi fans here,” shouted a handful of young men, who
were standing in line to vote in Kharad.
“The Muslims are producing 15 children, but the Hindus are not,”
said Mr. Malik, who wants the Bharatiya Janata Party to enact a two-child
policy. “How will we eat and live if the population keeps growing?” he said.
“This restriction will be on all of us.”
Several of the Muslims who fled Kharad last year to take refuge
in the nearby village of Loi said that they had not changed their voter
registration papers. They were escorted by security personnel when they went to
vote in their former home village on Thursday morning.
The Muslims who had returned to live in Kharad stood in line
next to their Hindu neighbors, waiting to cast their votes.
Mehboob Ali, 34, a homeopathic doctor, said he returned to the
village because of his house, career, farm and cattle. “What choice did I have?
But I don’t feel very secure,” he said.
Mr. Ali said that he had voted for the Samajwadi Party, which
announced employment quotas for Muslim communities in its election manifesto, a
controversial issue with many non-Muslims. But he said that he expected the
Bharatiya Janata Party to win, and for Mr. Modi to become prime minister – a
prospect he took in stride.
“It could raise tensions in the area, but it’s not as if there
will be an upheaval overnight,” he said. “I’m not scared about it.”
Betwa Sharma is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.
Follow her on Twitter @betwasharma.
