Ahmedabad: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday briefly paused halfway through his election rally speech in Gujarat, waiting for the `azaan’ - Muslim call to worship - from a nearby mosque to complete before continuing.
Modi was at Navsari in south Gujarat to address the last of his four election rallies in Saurashtra and south Gujarat, which will vote in the first phase of the Gujarat assembly election on December 9.
This is not the first time that the Prime Minister has halted his speech to let an `azaan’ from a mosque get over. In March 2016, while campaigning for the BJP in West Bengal’s Kharagpur, the Prime Minister halted his speech for a while until the `azaan’ was over.
He had some water from a glass and waited for about three minutes or so without saying anything even as the azaan played out from a loudspeaker nearby. After he prayer was over, Modi said that it was not good to interrupt someone while prayer was going on, and thus he took a little rest from his speech.
This comes in sharp contrast of the BJP candidate list which does not include even a single Muslim. Even in 2012, the party had not named any Muslim candidate for the then assembly election.
This time, BJP has a contest in its hands with the Congress experimenting with soft Hindutva in a bid to widen its voter base even as it attempts to stitch together a caste based support base of OBCs, Patidars and Dalits. Apart from this, Congress has fielded six Muslim candidates in this assembly election as compared to seven fielded in 2012.
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