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Surprise in Race for India’s Premier: A Wife, of Sorts Surprise in Race for India’s Premier: A Wife, of Sorts
(about 9 hours later)
NEW DELHI — After years of touting his bachelorhood, Narendra Modi, the favorite to become India’s next prime minister, quietly noted on an election registry on Wednesday that he is married. NEW DELHI — At a campaign rally this year, Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, offered this curious qualification for the post of India’s prime minister: He could not possibly be corrupt because he is a bachelor.
It was Mr. Modi’s first official acknowledgment of a marriage that he abandoned 45 years ago, just weeks after the wedding. Mr. Modi, a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, had previously left blank official questionnaires asking him to list his marital status. But in what is perhaps a lingering sign of ambivalence, Mr. Modi listed only his wife’s first name — Jashodaben. She was born Jashodaben Chimanlal but now goes by Jashodaben Chimanlal Modi. “Why would I indulge in corruption? For whom?” reasoned Mr. Modi, 63. “There is no one behind me or in front of me,” he continued, using a Hindi phrase that means he has no family. “I surrender this body. I surrender this heart.”
The acknowledgment caused a minor furor in India’s parliamentary elections in which voting began Monday and is being held on nine different days over six weeks, ending in May. Somabhai Damodardas Modi, Mr. Modi’s eldest brother, released a statement on Thursday saying his brother’s marriage “was a mere formality.” Mr. Modi revised his official biography on Wednesday, when he noted on an election registry that he is, in fact, married. In four previous registrations, he has left the question of his marital status blank, but scrutiny over the question steadily mounted as he became the front-runner for the post of prime minister.
“Since working for the nation was the only dream that Narendrabhai had, he left all worldly pleasures and left home,” his statement read. It was his first official acknowledgment of an arranged marriage he abandoned soon after the wedding about 45 years ago, during a period when he was considering becoming a monk or a full-time activist with a Hindu nationalist organization, which required a vow of celibacy.
Mr. Modi’s rivals quickly seized on the admission. Digvijaya Singh, of the Indian National Congress party, asked if a man who hid his marriage could be trusted. Mr. Modi and the B.J.P. took pains to keep the marriage quiet for many years, even when reporters managed to interview his wife, a village schoolteacher. He was silent on Thursday, though his oldest brother, Somabhai Damodardas Modi, released a statement saying that the marriage “was left as a formality” and that his brother had left the woman, Jashodaben Chimanlal, because he had chosen a life of service.
“He is betraying the people of this country in every way,” Mr. Singh said. “This person is mentally against women.” “Narendra’s whole life is a life of sacrifice, and we have to accept it; the whole country knows his sacrifice, and the people of the nation know it,” the statement said. “This event of 40 or 50 years back of a poor family in those circumstances should be seen in that context.”
Political analysts debated whether the acknowledgment might affect voting by women, who rarely appear at campaign rallies but whose role in the elections is seen as critical. Though leaders of the Congress Party accused Mr. Modi of deceiving the public, it was unclear whether news of his marriage — which was apparently not consummated — would damage Mr. Modi. Renunciation of family life is a tradition in India’s public life, going back to Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was married but took a vow of celibacy. Gandhi spoke of his wish to be “God’s eunuch,” and a “eunuch for the nation.”
In campaign speeches, Mr. Modi has touted his single status as a sign that he would be corruption-free as prime minister, since he has no close family to support. This year’s general election offered the unusual spectacle of a face-off between two men who boasted of being single: Last year, Congress’s Rahul Gandhi told supporters that he did not plan to get married because, as he put it, “I will become status-quo-ist, and I will like my children to take my place.”
But stories about Mr. Modi have long noted that he was married when he was 17, after being betrothed by his parents when he was just 3. He abandoned the marriage just weeks after the ceremony and disappeared for two years, later telling his family that he had been wandering in the Himalayas. Hinduism teaches reverence for intense self-control, growing in strength as a man passes through four stages of life — the student, the householder, the hermit and, finally, the wandering ascetic. The two prime-ministerial hopefuls are invoking that tradition “instrumentally,” in part because they sense rising public anger over corruption, said the historian Ramachandra Guha, author of “India After Gandhi.”
For years, reporters have trooped to the tiny village in Gujarat where Ms. Modi worked as a primary schoolteacher, hoping to interview her. Most have said that Ms. Modi was supportive of her husband but hesitant to answer questions, and some reported being asked to leave by local officials. “It is a religious, cultural tradition, and it is also statecraft, because it means you are not going to loot the public exchequer,” he said.
Darshan Desai, then a reporter for The Indian Express, was among the first to find her, in 2002 soon after riots in Gujarat, where Mr. Modi is chief minister. The riots killed more than 1,000 people and made Mr. Modi a controversial national figure. Mr. Modi was 17 when he decided to leave home and abandon his marriage to Ms. Chimanlal in favor of a period of wandering in the Himalayas, during which he apparently considered becoming a monk. A new biography of Mr. Modi, freshly published and distributed to journalists by the B.J.P., said the two never cohabitated or consummated their marriage.
Mr. Desai found Ms. Modi living in a one-room apartment with no toilet or bath and a monthly rent of 100 rupees, now equivalent to about $1.66. He said the school where she taught had a largely Muslim student body, remarkable because Mr. Modi leads a Hindu nationalist party and has fraught relations with Muslims following the 2002 riots whose toll fell heaviest on Muslims. “Narendra refused to do something he did not want to do, no matter what the cultural or family pressure,” said the biography, noting that Ms. Chimanlal “was not compelled under Indian law to remain contracted to Narendra, and could have asked her parents to find another suitor, or found one herself.”
Mr. Desai said he had to jump into a moving car to escape a village mob angry that he was searching for Ms. Modi, and he said Mr. Modi called him within minutes of his returning home and asked, “What is your agenda?” The journalists who have found Ms. Chimanlal have painted a sad picture, though. Early this year, she told The Indian Express that they had spent no more than three months together when he announced that “I will be traveling across the country and will go as and where I please,” and that she had not heard from him since then.
Ravinder Kaur, a professor of sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, said that teenage boys occasionally abandoned marriages arranged for them. She said she had no ill will toward Mr. Modi, but that she had not remarried, because “after this experience, I don’t think I want to. My heart is not into it.” She told the newspaper she was living on a monthly pension of 14,000 rupees, or about $233.
“It doesn’t get talked about much because families usually quietly rearrange things, but this kind of thing does happen,” Ms. Kaur said. “Hindu culture respects people like him, who are known as sannyasa, or renouncers.” Among the first to find Ms. Chimanlal was Darshan Desai, then a reporter for The Indian Express, who found Ms. Modi living in a one-room apartment with no toilet or bath and a monthly rent of 100 rupees, now worth about $1.66. Mr. Desai said he had to jump into a moving car to escape a village mob angry that he was searching for Ms. Chimanlal. He said Mr. Modi called him within minutes of his returning home and asked, “What is your agenda?”
In the ensuing years, Mr. Modi’s status as a bachelor became an essential part of his political biography. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of “Narendra Modi: The Man, the Times,” said Mr. Modi’s solitary life has positioned him as a refreshing alternative after a raft of corruption scandals hit the governing Congress Party.
“Here is a man who lives a spartan life, who does not even keep his mother with him,” Mr. Mukhopadhyay said. “It goes to enhance this moral halo around Modi, as a man who does nothing for himself.”
Mr. Gandhi, Mr. Modi’s main rival, belongs to the most famous political clan in India. His early life was shaped by the assassinations of his grandmother and father, who both served as prime minister.
Mr. Gandhi often seemed ambivalent about taking his place in the family business, criticizing the status quo as if his family did not form its central pillar. Mr. Gandhi, 43, has had serious girlfriends, and for years, the question of whether he would marry followed him everywhere, said Aarthi Ramachandran, author of “Decoding Rahul Gandhi.” But speculation has gradually receded, and last year’s “status quo-ist” comment seemed to put the matter permanently to rest. She said it could well be what he suggested: a principled stand.
“Is he giving something up?” she said. “I don’t quite know.”
Public renunciation reinforces the sense that candidates are not ordinary people but superior, more evolved creatures. This is implicit in grandeur of campaign appearances, where candidates step out of helicopters into blizzards of rose petals, to be wreathed in garlands of fresh flowers, as masses of people strain to touch their hand.
Many of India’s political heavyweights are single, including the so-called three ladies whose loyalties could well determine the shape of the next government: Tamil Nadu’s Jayalalitha Jayaram, who was convulsed with grief at the death of her cinema co-star, M. G. Ramachandran, and wrested control of his political party from his widow; West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee, who is said to have made a vow not to marry at the deathbed of her adored father, when she was just 9 years old; and Uttar Pradesh’s Mayawati, who has never said why she did not marry, but, when confronted, cast it as an advantage.
When a rival suggested that, because she was childless, she could not understand a mother’s pain, Mayawati called her critic “a mother of one, while I take care of hundreds and understand the pain of crores” — tens of millions — “of mothers.”