"Abandoned as a child bride, wife of Narendra Modi hopes he calls" by Annie Gowen, Washington Post January 25
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. Although she had not heard from her husband in years, she says she still hopes to join him one day in the capital as his spouse.
***********
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 young adolescents in keeping with the traditions of their community. They were then 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 RSS, a Hindu nationalist group. The young workers, pracharaks, are discouraged from marrying or maintaining close family ties.
“He joined RSS without divulging he had been married,” Mukhopadhyay said. “Without it he could not have become a pracharak. They had to be unmarried.”
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. He never publicly spoke of his wife, and journalists who sniffed around on the topic as Modi’s fame grew were privately discouraged from doing so....
--more--"
Related: Pakistani Split
Rising tensions in the region and the rest right down the memory hole for this Sunday slop?
