Mani Shankar Aiyar claims he never said that Narendra Modi would not become prime minister because he was a ‘chaiwallah’. In his third and final part of memoirs, titled, “A Maverick in Politics -1991–2004” [Juggernaut], Aiyar, a former union minister, ex-IFS and prolific columnist writes, “ I never called Modi a ‘chaiwallah’ and never advanced his having been a ‘chaiwallah’ as the reason for my believing he would never make it to the post of PM. Indeed, the person who said he was a ‘chaiwallah’ was Modi himself – to stress his somewhat doubtful claim to humble beginnings. The video of my remarks is still available on YouTube for anyone who cares to look. I have often invited my media critics, and even my party colleagues, to check this out – but they just do not want to because they are committed to their totally false premise that I had indeed described Modi as a ‘chaiwallah.’
Dwelling at lengths at ‘My Chaiwallah Comment’ in a chapter, “Decline . . . Fade Out . . . Fall: 2016–24” Aiyar gives a lengthy account of January 17, 2014 when an AICC plenary was taking place at Delhi’s Talkatora Stadium. This was at a time Modi was BJP’s prime ministerial candidate and seen by many as a likely winner of the 16th Lok Sabha polls. Aiyar recalls speaking to the TV news agency ANI and records, “…. So in the interview I stressed that it was outrageous for a man who did not know that Alexander had never come to Pataliputra or that Taxila (Takshashila) was in present-day Pakistan to seek to step into Jawaharlal Nehru’s shoes. The people of India would never accept this, I said, adding, ‘Never! Never! Never!’ in thundering tones. I then quipped that if, after he lost the election,Modi still wanted to serve tea, we could make some arrangements for him here [ at the AICC].”
Aiyar rues how his remark has, since then being touted as him having said that Modi could not become PM because he was a ‘chaiwallah’. “The media and Modi played out my alleged (but wholly untrue) remark about Modi being unfit to rule as PM because (as he claimed) he had begun life as a ‘chaiwallah’. This was no more than a hollow election gimmick that the election pundit, Prashant Kishor, who was given much of the credit for Modi’s stunning electoral victory, told me he had exploited to the full through the ‘chai pe charcha’ events that he stage managed with a hologram (then unknown and unprecedented) of Modi joining the tea drinkers.”
Aiyar also notes that his ‘chaiwallah’ remark provided a handle to ‘elements in the Congress party’ to later divert attention from the real causes of the party’s humiliating collapse at the 2014 hustings to shift the blame on this one remark put out in what he describes as a ‘sarcastic, if sneering, jest.’ Aiyar, 83, hints at his political fall when Rahul Gandhi was calling the shots. Five months after Rahul took over as the party president, he was told to relinquish his post of national convenor of the Rajiv Gandhi Panchayati Raj Sangathan (RGPRS) in favour. “I, of course, readily agreed – for what is Caesar’s must be rendered unto Caesar,” Aiyar writes in his characteristic, cheeky manner.
A self-proclaimed Rajiv and Sonia loyalist, Aiyar seems in pain and anguish while writing this, “my only party post (RGPRS), turned out to be the last bilateral I had with Sonia over the next ten years, despite trying frequently to get through to her. This was also the case with Rahul and with Priyanka, after she entered politics. This is often put down to the ‘feudal’ atmosphere of the party and its ‘authoritarian’ ways.”
Aiyar also refers to another remark against Narendra Modi that led to his suspension from the grand old party.
This happened on December 7, 2017 when Gujarat assembly polls were underway and a Rahul led Congress was fancying its chances in Modi’s home state.
Aiyar told ANI how Modi was a ‘neech kisam ka aadmi’ (a low kind of person), a remark that led to his ultimate downfall from the Congress. “Minutes after my comment was telecast, Modi, who was campaigning in Gujarat (at Limbayat in Surat district), twisted my words to claim I had described him as a ‘low-caste’ man, that I had said, ‘This Modi belongs to a neech caste, this Modi is a neech.’ This was completely untrue.”
According to Aiyar, he had made no reference to Modi’s caste. “I had not called anyone ‘low caste’. Yet Modi, it was reported, had referred to me or my remark some twenty times in his fifty-minute speech – that is, an average of once every two and a half minutes. Modi knew what he was doing: laying a trap into which the Congress would be caught. The desperately anxious Congress leaders swallowed Modi’s lie hook, line and sinker.”
Instead, unilaterally and without due process, the Congress, Aiyar laments and writes, accepted Modi’s word for it that he had described him as a ‘low-caste’ person. “They had clearly not plumbed the depths of the man who was Prime Minister but preferred to give a dog a bad name and hang it. I was deeply upset, swinging on my emotional pendulum from fury to wonderment that I was being abandoned without explanation.”
By this time Aiyar was not only disillusioned but had no illusions.
