Congress leaders have time and again taken digs at the humble beginnings of Prime Minister Modi. It all started five years back when Mani Shankar Aiyar in January 2014, just a few months before the country voted in 2014 general elections, said, “Modi can never become PM, can sell tea.”
The then BJP’s prime ministerial candidate took this opportunity to make it part of his campaign with widely popular ‘Chai Pe Charcha’, where he held talks and connected with citizens over chai. Aiyar was left to gulp down his words, as a few months later, not only did Modi become the prime minister, he did so with a thumping majority.
But the elitist comments from Congress didn’t stop. In fact, Mani Shankar Aiyar himself upped his game and during the run-up to Gujarat Assembly elections last year, he called PM Modi ‘neech’, a lowly, casteist slur.
Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad too has made a casteist statement on PM Modi by referring to him as ‘Gangu Teli’ (Modi belongs to the Teli caste). Congress leader Jairam Ramesh referred to PM Modi as ‘Bhasmasur’, a mythological demon, during the 2014 elections.
Not to be left too behind, Congress President Rahul Gandhi himself had once referred to PM Modi as ‘khoon ka dalal‘ after the surgical strikes.
Yesterday, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor commented that it is because of Jawaharlal Nehru, the patriarch of the entitled dynasty that has believed India is their family business, that a ‘chaiwala’ has become a prime minister.
https://twitter.com/ANI/status/1062420165088960513?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Amusingly, Tharoor’s remark comes just months after another senior Congress leader and a staunch Nehru-Gandhi family loyalist Mallikarjun Kharge had said that a ‘chaiwala’ could become a prime minister only because Congress ‘preserved democracy’.
This comes from a party which out of 71 odd years of Indian independence has been in power for 55 years. Of these 55 years, someone from The Family was the prime minister for 37 odd years. Narendra Modi winning elections with a thumping victory in 2014 was a proverbial slap on the collective faces of the slaves of the dynasty.
A man from humble beginnings, with no fortune to spend, no surname to back, has become the prime minister and the elitist Congress leaders cannot digest it.
Shashi Tharoor’s remark is just the reflection of deep-rooted casteist, elitist mindset Congress nurtures while masquerading as a socialist, liberal political party.
So, no, Shashi Tharoor. It is not because of Nehru that a ‘chaiwala’ has become a Prime Minister of India. It is despite Nehru and his progeny that have believed themselves, heirs of the coveted chair, that he has become the Prime Minister of India.
As an aside, the timing of Tharoor’s comment about the Prime Minister being a ‘chaiwala’ is eerily similar to Aiyar’s comment. If history is anything to go by, Congress should be careful of the ides of March.