Abandoned as a child bride, wife of India’s prime minister hopes he calls
By Annie Gowen January 25 at 11:37 AM
NEW DELHI — She’s waiting for him, as she has been all her life. But
when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi dined with Barack and Michelle Obama at a glittering banquet Sunday night, his wife wasn’t by his side.
Modi, 64, kept his teenage marriage a secret for decades during his political ascent and only last year admitted that his wife exists.
The wife, Jashodaben Chimanlal Modi, is a retired teacher who lives in a small town in Modi’s home state of Gujarat. Though she had not heard from her husband in years, she says she still hopes to join him one day in the capital as India’s first lady.
“If he calls me, I will go,” she said in an interview. “I hear all his speeches on TV. I feel very good when I hear him speak. I want him to fulfill all his promises to the people. That’s my prayer to God.”
Narendra Modi, the son of a man who sold tea in a railway station, comes from a lower caste called Ghanchi. He and his wife were promised to each other as children in keeping with the traditions of their community. They were married in a small ceremony when she was 17 and he was 18.
“He was very young,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, the author of the book “Narendra Modi: The Man, the Times.” “The exact nature of the ceremony we don’t know. Nobody who has spoken about it is willing to talk. There would have been a ritual that joined them together as man and wife, but they would not have lived together. The family said that the two of them never cohabitated.”
Child marriage was and remains common in India, although it is technically illegal. More than a third of the women who married as child brides live in India, an estimated 240 million, according to the U.N. Children’s Fund.
Narendra Modi left shortly thereafter to wander in the Himalayas with little more than a change of clothing in his rucksack, Mukhopadhyay said. A devout Hindu, Modi was contemplating religious life. Instead, he returned to Gujarat and became a volunteer, or “pracharak,” in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., a Hindu nationalist group. The young workers, pracharaks, are discouraged from marrying or maintaining close family ties.
“He joined R.S.S. without divulging he had been married,” Mukhopadhyay said. “Without it he could not have become a pracharak. They had to be unmarried. Questions would have been asked.”
Modi never returned to his wife but never divorced her, even as he became the high-profile chief minister of Gujarat and last year, India’s premier. ...
Rest of story at WashPost
