Ahead of Gujarat state assembly elections, Rahul Gandhi took a slight detour from his Bharat Jodo ‘container yatra’ and visited the poll bound state to address rallies. His one rally was in Surat, where he arrived via helicopter, and other in Rajkot. While addressing a rally in Surat, Congress brought up former Gujarat Pradesh Congress President Bharatsinh Solanki on stage as ‘translator’ so he could translate Rahul Gandhi’s speech from Hindi to Gujarati.
However, amusingly, after about 13 minutes into addressing the gathering, while Rahul Gandhi was recounting the anecdote about his grandmother and how he enjoyed reading a picture book, Solanki stopped translation midway and left the stage saying how people in Gujarat can understand Rahul Gandhi’s Hindi and they would not quite need a translator.
Gujaratis, as a community, have always been welcoming and even if they are not fluent in Hindi, they would try to accommodate those who do not understand regional language to make them feel at home. Further, Gujarati and Hindi being sister languages, Hindi becomes fairly simpler to comprehend.
Bharatsinh Solanki had taken ‘break’ from politics over altercation with estrange wife
Former Gujarat Congress President Bharatsinh Solanki, in June this year announced a ‘short break’ from active politics after his estranged wife beat him up along with a woman she accused him of having an affair with. She had earlier accused him of domestic violence.
In the viral video from June this year, Solanki’s wife caught him with a girl in the girl’s house, and that even led to a physical altercation. During the press conference, Bharatsinh Solanki leveled several allegations against his wife, with whom he has been having a long-standing dispute.
Reshma Patel, Bharatsinh Solanki’s estranged wife, was seen beating him up after she caught her husband red-handed with another girl in his bungalow in Anand.
In the video, it is seen that as soon as Reshma Patel opens the door and enters the house, Bharatsinh Solanki comes running and stops Reshma Patel and asks to call the police. However, Reshma Patel and the people accompanying her enter the house and Reshma Patel catches hold of the girl and starts beating her and pulling her hair. However, in the meantime, Bharatsinh Solanki appears to be stopping them.
In the video, ‘You are sitting with my husband… I won’t leave you…’ and more sentences like ‘Take the video of this’ and ‘Show your face’ are heard. Meanwhile, the girl is seen trying to hide her face.
Later Solanki had said he had gone to the woman’s house to have an ice cream. “That house belonged to the girl Riddhi Parmar. Let me be frank and tell you that if I get rid of my wife, she will be ready to accept me and it will be my third marriage. If someone agrees to accept me, then I am destined to have a third marriage,” he had said.
However, despite the videos of a woman associated with Solanki being beaten up brutally by his estranged wife had gone viral, no one from party’s leadership have given a statement on it. For a party that claims to be about women empowerment, they have been quite silent on the two women in this story.
Bharatsinh Solanki is son of Madhavsinh Solanki, former Gujarat Chief Minister who came up with the ‘KHAM’ (Kshatriya-Harijan-Adivasi-Muslim) theory for Congress votebank. Under his chief ministership, Gujarat witnessed some of the worst communal riots in the 80s.