New Delhi: Questions surround videos posted on social media purporting to show a slipper landing on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s car as he drove through Varanasi on June 18.
Footage circulated on social media sites appear to show a flat flying object, looking somewhat like a slipper, landing on the hood of Modi’s car. One of his bodyguards from Special Protection Group, riding on the outside of the car, is seen reaching for it and throwing it back at the crowd.
The Telegraph has reported that Modi’s convoy was headed from the Dashashvamedha Ghat to KV Mandir when the incident happened.
The report and also Free Press Journal‘s, note a bystander having said, “Chappal phenk ke maara [a slipper has been hurled]”, amidst chants of “Modi, Modi”. Many on social media called the object that landed on his car a slipper or chappal as well.
Multiple reports have highlighted that whatever the object, the incident was a security breach.
This is Modi’s first visit to his constituency since his victory from there in the Lok Sabha election. Modi has returned as prime minister but has been significantly humbled in the polls. From Varanasi, he recorded a drastically lower margin from 2019 and ranks 116th amongst 240 BJP MPs’ margins, much lower than many other opposition leaders.
A senior Uttar Pradesh police officer told Telegraph that a mobile phone, and not a slipper, had landed on the car and had been hurled “unintentionally.”
Iraq
On December 14, 2008. US head of government, George W. Bush became the first head of the executive to have footwear hurled at him this millennium, which, because he ducked deftly, did not hit the target. But unlike the gravity and significance of a chappal, if there was one hurled at the PM’s car in his own constituency, the shoe was hurled not in the United States, nor by a US national. Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi did it while Bush was on a foreign trip, in protest against the US’s unconscionable war in Iraq. The incident took place after Bush had lost to Barack Obama but Obama had yet to assume office.
Fifteen years after the incident last December, the shoe-hurler’s risk-taking abilities have been acknowledged as it could have “had dire effects on his own life — a risk he was well aware of beforehand — but it lives on in the public imagination worldwide as perhaps the most effective individual protest against America’s bloody and ultimately disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq.”
