Narendra Modi has chaiwala: Did 'completely horrified' Mani Shankar Aiyar ever say that?

New Delhi veteran Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar says he never called Narendra Modi a 'chaiwala' and that his firm belief that the BJP leader was unfit for the post of Prime Minister was not based on his past as a tea seller. Aiyar addresses the controversy surrounding his comments in the run-up to the 2014 general election in his upcoming book “A Maverick in Politics”, published by Juggernaut.

In the book, 83-year-old Aiyar talks about his early days in politics, navigating through the PV Narasimha Rao years, his stint as a minister in the UPA I, his tenure in Rajya Sabha, and then his “decline. .. disappears”. …autumn”.

Aiyar recounts in the book that for him, personally, the 2014 elections started on a bad note when the AICC met in a pre-election plenary session on January 17, 2014 in New Delhi and he was interviewed in the room conferences at Talkatora Stadium. .
Modi, the BJP's presumptive candidate for prime minister, was being touted as the clear winner in the upcoming general elections, he says in the book.

“I was totally horrified that a man scarred, I thought irreparably, by the carnage of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, could aspire to lead the India of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru,” he says in the book .

So in the interview Aiyar said he pointed out that it was outrageous for a man who did not know that Alexander never came to Pataliputra or that Taxila (Takshashila) was in present-day Pakistan of seek to put oneself in Jawaharlal Nehru's place. “The people of India would never accept this,” I said, adding: “Never! Never ! Never!” in a booming tone, I then joked that if, after losing the elections, Modi still wanted to serve him tea, we could make arrangements for him here,” he said. “It was touted at the time – and since – that I said Modi could not become prime minister because he was a 'chaiwallah'. I never called Modi a 'chaiwallah' and “I never suggested that he was a 'chaiwallah' like that. This is why I think he will never achieve the post of Prime Minister,” Aiyar says in the book.

Indeed, the person who said he was a “chaiwala” was Modi himself – to highlight his somewhat dubious claims to humble beginnings, he adds.

“The video of my remarks is still available on YouTube for anyone who wants to watch it. I have often invited my media critics, and even my party colleagues, to watch it, but they simply won't do it because that they are totally committed to their false premise that I had effectively described Modi as a 'chaiwallah' who, therefore, could not be Prime Minister,” the Congress leader said.

The irony of Modi himself claiming to be a 'chaiwala' is not lost on them, he adds.

“Not knowing that this would become the main news story a few hours later, poor Rahul Gandhi singled me out from my obscure corner of the public eye to publicly assert that my support for Panchayati Raj made me the kind of role model of what the party aimed to ensure,” says Aiyar.

Gandhi also added Sam Pitroda to make us twin role models for party workers, Aiyar recalled.

“The media and Modi carried my purported (but totally false) remark that Modi was unfit to lead as Prime Minister because (as he claimed) he started life as a 'chaiwallah'. This does not was nothing more than a hollow election ploy that the Election expert, Prashant Kishor, who takes much of the credit for Modi's resounding election victory, told me took full advantage of events “chai pe charcha” that he had organized with a (then unknown and unprecedented) hologram of Modi joining the tea drinkers,” says Aiyar.

“This empowered elements of the Congress party to divert attention from the real causes of the party's humiliating collapse in the elections to place the blame on this single remark made in a sarcastic, albeit sneering, joking manner,” says Aiyar in the book. .

In the book, Aiyar also addresses other controversies involving him, including the “neech” line of remarks.

He claims Modi twisted his comments to claim he had described him as a “low caste” man, which was “completely false”.

“The Congress campaign in Gujarat was run on the basis of the completely wrong idea that Rahul Gandhi was going to win the state in his very first election campaign after being elected party president. Thus, the party and the leadership convinced themselves that I had upset the basket,” he said.

“No one bothered to ask me or watch the video. No one stopped to wonder whether, given my personal background and long diplomatic and political career, I could have launched a “Insult against castes. No one even watched Modi's video. A long history of distorted remarks during unrestrained election campaigns, where facts and truth are the first casualties,” he said.