NEW DELHI: They meet at official gatherings but there has been “no real contact with him”, writes Sonia Gandhi about Prime Minister Narendra Modi in her memoir, ‘Belonging: A Journey Of Love’, which hits the stands on November 10.
“Narendra Damodardas Modi has been the prime minister of India for more than twelve years as of this writing and is now in his third term in office. To this day, I’ve had practically no real contact with him,” she says in the book.
The former Congress chief says whenever the two come together, they greet each other with a namaste, but claims that the Prime Minister “tends to look away, avoiding eye contact”, which she says is a departure from the cordiality expressed by leaders in the past.
“We meet at semi-official gatherings — for instance, at the end of every Parliament session, when leaders of the major parties customarily gather at the Speaker’s chamber. It’s a very small room, and usually many people are present, but when he comes face-to-face with me, we greet each other with a formal namaste. This is different from the past, when leaders across party divides would treat one another with cordiality. He tends to look away, avoiding eye contact,” Gandhi says.
“Apart from such brief exchanges, we have never really conversed, though we’ve exchanged formal birthday and New Year greetings over the years,” she says, acknowledging that they come from different ideological worlds with Modi’s idea of the country being vastly different from hers.
On occasions when Gandhi returned from a stint in the hospital, Modi has asked, “Theek hain aap?” (“Are you all right?”), to which she replied, “Jee, ab main theek hoon, shukriya (“Yes, thank you, I’m fine now”),” the book says.
Sonia Gandhi claims that PM Modi’s idea of India was constructed by the ideologues of the RSS, which, she says, affirmed a “fundamentalism in his faith” while hers was assimilated from the members of her family that drew from the the principles of liberty and equality for all.
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