A day after former Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s charges about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s OBC status, the Opposition party leaders on Friday claimed that the Prime Minister was “misleading” the country in the name of his caste and questioned his OBC status.
Two prominent Opposition leaders — former Chief Minister of Rajasthan Ashok Gehlot and Rajya Sabha member and Gujarat Congress president Shaktisinh Gohil — said that Mr. Modi’s caste was included in the list of OBCs much later; he never claimed to be from an OBC community earlier but does it now for political purposes.
“Modi surname is very common among communities engaged in trading and they are all from upper castes. If PM Modi is indeed from the OBC as he claims, then he must immediately accept the demand of the Congress party and Rahul Gandhi for caste census,” Mr. Gehlot said in a post on X.
He also stated that the Prime Minister’s caste — Ghanchi or Teli (engaged in oil pressing work in the past) — was not considered OBC in Gujarat when the State government had set up a Baxi Commission to identify castes or communities. These communities were initially categorised as Socially and Educationally Backward Castes (SEBC) in Gujarat, and later identified as OBCs nationally, he added.
Addressing a press conference at the Congress headquarters in Delhi, Mr. Gohil reiterated Mr. Gandhi’s claim that the Prime Minister is not an OBC by birth and stated that the BJP spread “lies” repeatedly about Mr. Modi’s caste status.
To buttress his claim, Mr. Gohil cited a Gujarat government notification and said that the date of the notification was January 1, 2002, when Narendra Modi himself was the Chief Minister.
“According to the notification, new castes were added; among them were Ghanchi Muslim, Teli, Modh Ghanchi, Teli Sahu, Teli Rathore. There is no mention of Modi community anywhere in this notification issued on January 1, 2002...Modi was neither an OBC before nor is he today,” he alleged.
“So Modi ji is neither a Ghanchi, nor a Teli, nor a lower caste; he belongs to Modi which is super upper caste,” Mr. Gohil claimed.
He added that if Modi is the “biggest OBC”, then why does he not write Modi Ghanchi or Modi Teli in front of his name? He also said that Mr. Modi never identified himself as an OBC leader when he was appointed as Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001.
Another Gujarat Congress leader, Amit Chavda also questioned Mr. Modi’s OBC credentials and stated that his caste was never included in the original list of OBC communities in Gujarat.
On Thursday, Mr. Gandhi, while making a brief speech in Odisha’s Jharsuguda during the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, said Mr. Modi was born into a family that belonged to the general or upper caste category.
Soon after, BJP leaders rubbished the charges as “blatant lies” and condemned the Congress parliamentarian for saying that Mr. Modi got his caste included in the OBC list in Gujarat when he was the State’s Chief Minister.
