BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday came down heavily on Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for his reported ‘dehati aurat’ barb at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
He lamented that the India’s Prime Minister was humiliated by his own party leaders, and this gave the neighbouring country the courage to insult him.Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had reportedly called Singh as a ‘rural woman’ during an interaction with journalists in the US.
“We may have political differences, we may fight over policies, but that does not mean we will allow any other country to insult our Prime Minister,” Modi said.
“How dare Nawaz Sharif call India’s PM a village womanIJ India is a country of 1.2 billion people, we will never tolerate this,” he thundered.
Modi said Sharif perhaps mustered the courage for such audacity as Singh’s own party leader Rahul Gandhi has called the Government-backed Ordinance on convicted MPs as ‘complete nonsense’. “If his own party does not respect the Prime Minister, how will he have respect in the worldIJ” he asked.
Modi also said: “The journalists who were sitting in front of Nawaz Sharif when he was insulting our Prime Minister should also answer to the people of my country.” “I want to ask those journalists, I don’t know who were they but journalists of my country who were having sweets sitting with Nawaz Sharif when he was abusing our Prime Minister calling him village woman, I expected those Indian journalists, the country expected them, to refuse the sweets and walk out,” said the Gujarat Chief Minister.
The controversy erupted following a comment by a well-known Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir on Geo TV that Sharif had used this description “dehati aurat” (village woman) during a breakfast meeting with him and NDTV’s Barkha Dutt on Saturday while expressing his unhappiness that Singh complained to US President Barack Obama about Sharif on Pakistan. However, Dutt on Twitter said, “This (Mir’s version) is a distortion entirely” and that Sharif said “nothing of this kind”.
Meanwhile, in New York, Mir told PTI that PM Sharif did not use these words. “But the Prime Minister (Sharif) said why Prime Minister Singh should complain to President (Barack) Obama. If he has any complaints he should tell me,” Mir said.