"How dare you (Sharif) address my nation's Prime Minister as a village woman? There cannot be a bigger insult of the Indian Prime Minister. We can fight with him on policies but this we will not tolerate. This nation of 1.2 billion will not tolerate its Prime Minister's insult," Modi, BJP's Prime Ministerial candidate, said at a huge rally here.
The controversy has its roots in a comment by a well-known Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir on Geo TV that Sharif had used this description "dehati aurat" (village woman) during a breakfast meeting with him and NDTV's Barkha Dutt yesterday while expressing his unhappiness that Singh complained to US President Barack Obama about Sharif on Pakistan.
Dutt said there were bits in the interaction that were off the record. Secondly, this is distortion even of the off the record, she said.
She went on to add that the bits that were off record did not include any pejorative word about the PM.
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Mir in the programme quoted Sharif as saying, "It seems as if Manmohan Singh went to complain to Obama about me like a 'dehati aurat'.
Modi, who made an issue of the comments, said, "The journalists who were sitting in front of Nawaz Sharif when he was insulting our Prime Minister should also answer to the people of my country".