New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pinstripe monogrammed bandhgala suit, which hogged limelight during President Barack Obama's visit, went up for auction in the diamond city on Wednesday.
Modi met US president Barack Obama earlier this year wearing a pin-stripe suit with each stripe actually being his own name spelled out over and over.
The suit immediately became a talking point, and even turned into an election issue after opposition politicians began calling it the Rs 10 lakh suit, based off a less-than-reliable report in the media about its cost. Modi suit has been kept for auction and the money raised will go for clean Ganga project.
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But do you know the man who gifted Modi this name stripped suit. Rameshkumar Bhikabhai Virani, director of the KARP Group which manufactures and markets polished diamonds and diamond jewelry. The Non-Resident Indian businessman told ANI that he gave the suit to Modi as a "surprise" gift, earlier this year.
In an interview with ANI, Rameshkumar Bhikabhai, a businessman from Gujarat, revealed the origins of the suit that had the nation and the media talking. Bhikabhai said that he gifted the suit to Modi to wear on his son's wedding.
"I presented this suit to him (Prime Minister Modi) when I attended the recent Vibrant Gujarat Summit. I gave it while extending an invitation to him to attend my son's wedding on January 26," Virani told ANI. "I gave this gift to my elder brother (Prime Minister Modi) on behalf of my son. My son had this idea of making this monogrammed suit. He said he wanted to give a surprise to Modiji."
Bhikabhai, an NRI businessman, said that his friendship with Modi went back four decades, and he had insisted that the prime minister attends his son's wedding “as an elder of the family."
The suit will be up for auction by the Gujarat government today and the proceedings are set to go to the clean Ganga project.
