New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday paused his victory speech to party workers midway on hearing the Azaan, the Muslim call for prayer, from a mosque near the party’s new headquarters in the capital.
Modi had barely started his address on the BJP’s emphatic victory in Tripura and good showing in Nagaland when the call for Maghreb Azaan rang out. The Maghreb Azaan is given out at dusk.
He stopped his speech and informed the party cadres about the Azaan. He stayed silent for two minutes and the party workers also remained still till the time the call for prayer continued. As soon as it got over, PM Modi resumed his speech with chants of ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and the party workers joined him with great fervour.
This is not the first time that the PM has stopped his speech for the Azaan. During the campaign for Gujarat elections in November, he had stopped speaking in Navsari. In 2016, PM Modi stopped his speech for over five minutes during an election rally in West Bengal’s Kharagpur when he heard the sound of Azaan.
“I do not want to interrupt anyone’s prayers. So I decided to take a brief rest,” he had said after it ended.
The Prime Minister, later in his speech on Saturday, again paused and observed a minute’s silence, for BJP workers who have been killed in political violence in Tripura. He dubbed them as shaheed (martyrs).
“Many workers of the BJP have sacrificed their lives. Politics is all about ideology and this is a defeat of the maoist-thinking of Left parties,” he said, adding that the party cadre has also faced attacks in Karnataka, Kerala, West Bengal and Karnataka, all states where the BJP hopes to make electoral gains.
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