Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar has dismissed the allegation that he had made casteist remarks against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asserting that his comments were directed at the PM's ‘character’, not his caste.
The bureaucrat-turned-politician also said he was called the ‘child of Macaulay’ for speaking English and questioned whether PM Modi knew Tamil. Reacting to Aiyar's remarks, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders and workers held a protest in Jaipur on Sunday and burnt his effigy.
Aiyar attended a programme in New Delhi on Saturday evening. Speaking on the controversy surrounding his alleged past remarks, the former Union minister said he never described PM Modi as someone hailing from a ‘low caste’. "I never called him a person of 'neecha jaat' (low caste). I said he was a low kind of person, referring to his character. That is completely different," he said.
Aiyar said his remarks were misinterpreted and projected in a way that suggested that he was referring to Modi's caste. He claimed that the Prime Minister portrayed the comments as a caste-based insult because Aiyar was a Brahmin. Referring to another controversy over his alleged remarks that a ‘tea seller cannot become the Prime minister’, Aiyar said he had never made such a statement and that the claim attributed to him was incorrect.
"I never said that because he is a tea-seller, he cannot become the Prime Minister," Aiyar said, adding that his criticism was instead directed at what he described as PM Modi's ‘lack of historical knowledge’. According to Aiyar, he had questioned how a person who, in his view, was not aware of certain historical facts, could occupy the post that was once held by Jawaharlal Nehru.
Aiyar said he had referred to historical points, such as the fact that Alexander never reached Pataliputra and that while Nalanda was in India, Taxila was now in Pakistan. Aiyar said after making those remarks, he had jokingly added that if PM Modi wanted to distribute tea after losing the election, arrangements could be made. "Who called him a tea-seller? PM Modi himself said he was a tea-seller," Aiyar said.
He also raised doubts about PM Modi's assertion that he sold tea at a railway platform in his hometown of Vadnagar in Gujarat, claiming that the town did not have a railway platform until 1973. Aiyar alleged that such claims and ‘misleading narratives’ played a role in PM Modi's rise to the top post. He also alleged that certain remarks made about Muslims had contributed to communal polarisation in the country.
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