Recently, a purported newspaper clip has gone viral amid the Lok Sabha election which claims to be the reason why Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s father passed away. The article also carried a popular photo of young Narendra Modi in a National Cadet Corps uniform. According to the excerpt Modi at a very tender age, stole gold from him and for which he got a cardiac arrest and passed away. The article in the newspaper is headlined in Hindi,which when translated reads, ‘Narendra Modi’s brothers and sister blame him for their father’s death’. Even in the recent past a news resurfaced which claimed the PM to be ‘kleptomaniac’.
The article reads that Modi’s father, Damodardas Mulchand Modi, used to make ends meet by pickpocketing and stealing coal and iron from a railway station where he worked as a tea seller. He traded the stolen items for gold, which, in turn, were stolen by Modi when he was young. His father, unable to cope with his son’s actions, suffered a cardiac arrest. The family could not get back the stolen gold despite lodging an FIR and Damodardas subsequently died because the family couldn’t afford the medical expenses. The story also claims that former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee suppressed the case and dismissed an FIR against Modi in 1996.
This went massively viral on the social media sites. A Facebook user Vikay Jat shared this post in Hindi, and its English translation reads, “Prahlad Modi said that Narendra Modi ran away from home after stealing jewellery.”
The same newspaper clip was shared by Daman and Diu Congress Sevaldal on Twitter on July 21, 2020.
Similar news resurfaced back in 2017 where Velaram M Patel was claimed to be a member of Congress as per his Facebook bio.
On getting in touch with PM’s family to check the fact, the family refuted the claims and younger brother Prahlad Modi, dismissed the claims and said that no one in the family had filed an FIR against the prime minister, as the clipping suggested. He said, “This is completely false,” he added, our father died in 1989 of bone cancer. Narendra was an RSS pracharak at the time and was home for father’s funeral.”
His elder brother Soma Modi said, “My father had bone cancer and died in 1989.” He added that Narendra Modi was at Kailash Mansarovar Yatra at the time. “Narendra came back home and gave father prasad from Mansarovar. Father passed away the next day,” he continued.
Prime Minister’s biographer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay was also contacted, who gave deep insights to the statements of PM Modi’s family. “To the best of my knowledge and the conversations I’ve had Mr Modi during the time I was researching for my book, he’d said that his father died in 1989-90.”
According to the excerpts from Mukhopadhyay’s biography of PM Modi – ‘Narendra Modi: The Man, the Times’ Narendra Modi left his village and broke away from his family in 1967. He came home for a few hours in 1989 when his father passed away.
According to a Times of India report, in 2018, PM Modi once during one a political speech referred to his father and stated, “who died 30 years ago”.
Thus, it is clear that the newspaper clipping claiming that PM Modi’s siblings hold him guilty for their father’s demise and that their father died of a heart attack is fake. His siblings were clearly heard stating that their father died of bone cancer in 1989, and Narendra Modi was born in 1950 and would’ve been nearly 40 years of age at his father’s demise.Therefore, the viral news is fake.
