Rahul Gandhi accuses PM Modi of giving scripted interviews

NEW DELHI: In a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Monday charged that his interviews on public platforms are scripted.

"The first Indian PM who takes "spontaneous" questions that the translator has pre-scripted answers to!" said Rahul in a tweet.

The Gandhi scion was alluding to an interview PM Modi gave at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) last Friday. After the Prime Minister had responded to a question on addressing challenges faced by Asia, his English translator read out a lengthy passage from a piece of paper which included facts and figures not part of Modi's anwer. This fueled speculation that the queries posed to the PM, and his responses to them, were not impromptu but part of an elaborately pre-planned script.

Rahul also claimed that Modi has time and again refused to answer "real questions" posed by himself and other opposition leaders.

"Good that he doesn't take real questions. Would have been a real embarrassment to us all if he did," the Congress leader jibed.



On Sunday, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor too had pointed out the apparent mix-up in who was supposed to say what during the NTU interview.

"Oh dear. When the translator says what the PM was supposed to say, but didn't," Tharoor had tweeted.



Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent interviews have come under scrutiny, with a two-hour-long conversation with Censor Board chief Prasoon Joshi at an Indian diaspora event in London earlier this year being mostly panned for fielding questions that were perceived as "soft" and tailor-made to flatter the PM's image.