The budget session had a stormy start on Friday with the BJP grabbing at Sonia Gandhi’s use of the sympathetic expression "poor thing" for President Droupadi Murmu, who had a long speech to read, and accusing her of insulting a "tribal daughter”.
“The President was getting very tired by the end. She could hardly speak, poor thing,” Sonia told reporters, referring to the President’s nearly 85-minute address to the joint sitting of both Houses, customary at the start of the budget session.
Sonia, flanked by son Rahul Gandhi and daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, also used the expression "poor lady" for Murmu.
Rahul, leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, said the President’s speech was "boring" and "repetitive", targeting the government that had prepared most of the text.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party seized on the Gandhis’ remarks to target the Congress’s "royal family”, accusing Sonia of calling Murmu "poor" and a “thing”. The President’s House too said the comments by “some prominent leaders of the Congress party” were in “poor taste, unfortunate and entirely avoidable”, before appearing to take a dig at Sonia’s foreign origins.
In a post on X, BJP president J.P. Nadda said Sonia’s use of the phrase “poor thing” showed the Congress’s “elitist, anti-poor and anti-tribal nature”. He demanded an “unconditional apology” to the “President and the tribal communities”.
The President’s House said: “These leaders have said that the President was getting very tired by the end and she could hardly speak. Rashtrapati Bhawan would like to clarify that nothing could be farther from the truth.”
The President’s House said the “President was not tired at any point” and added: “Indeed, she has believed that speaking up for the marginalised communities, for women and farmers, as she was doing during the course of her address, can never be tiring.
“The President’s office believes it might be the case that these leaders have not acquainted themselves with the idiom and discourse in Indian language such as Hindi, and thus formed a wrong impression.”
Modi, addressing a poll rally in Delhi, said: “A member of the royal family said the tribal daughter gave a boring speech. Another member went a step further and called the President a ‘poor thing’, called her poor and a ‘thing’, called her ‘tired’. They find the speech of a tribal daughter boring. This is an insult to the 10 crore tribal brothers and sisters of the country.”
Priyanka castigated the BJP and the media for “twisting” her mother’s remarks. “My mother is a 78-year-old lady. She has simply said, ‘The President must have been tired reading such a long speech, poor thing’,” she told reporters. “She fully respects (the President)….”
The foundation for the political battle was laid in the morning, before the President’s address, when Modi claimed this Parliament session was “perhaps the first since 2014 when there has been no foreign attempt to stoke a fire from abroad”.
While reports by foreign agencies against the Adani group had rocked Parliament for the last two years, Modi’s use of the word “first” seemed to suggest he counted the furore against the demonetisation and the now-scrapped farm laws as foreign fire.
The political duel over Sonia’s remarks overshadowed the contents of the President’s speech, which extolled the Modi government’s achievements.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said the praise of the government in the speech was “predictable”; what gave cause for concern were the omissions: the economy, “the issues hurting the aam aadmi, the middle class”, joblessness.
