By IANS
New Delhi : Gujarat officials claim Chief Minister Narendra Modi has been invited to the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos in January 2008, but the organisation has denied sending any invitation to him.
“Modi has not received an official invitation to the annual meeting (of the WEF). In any case, we would not issue an invitation to a political leader when elections (in the state) are pending,” WEF communications director Mark Adams told IANS, speaking by phone.
Pankaj Patel of the Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry and D. Rajgopalan, the state’s principal secretary of industries, earlier told the media that Modi was personally invited to the Dalian and Davos summits by Klaus Schwabb, chairman and founder of the WEF.
Modi had participated in the three-day WEF conference held in September in Dalian in China, also known as “Summer Davos”.
Adams said, “He did indeed receive an invite, but as far as I am aware, it was a normal invite and not from Professor Schwab personally.”
According to a statement by Indian Muslim Council (IMC), a non-profit group comprising Indian Muslims in the US, the WEF decided to rescind the invitation to the Gujarat chief minister for the 2008 summit following a campaign by scholar Omar Khalidi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston, highlighting alleged human rights violations by Modi’s government in 2002.
More than 100 academicians reportedly wrote to the WEF, protesting any move to extend an invite to Modi.
More than 1,000 people – a majority of them Muslims – were killed in statewide communal clashes that followed the burning of a train compartment in Godhra town in which 59 Hindu activists had died Feb 27, 2002.
Modi, whose government was widely criticised for allegedly doing little to contain the violence, faces charges of ignoring the plight of the victims.
“The Modi camp often exaggerates claims to give the impression that Gujarat is the best governed state in India and that he, even though barred from entering the US, is much in demand on world stage. The news that Modi has no invitation to Davos exposes the lie that was fed to the media,” said the statement.
The US in March 2005 denied Modi a diplomatic visa and also revoked his tourist/business visa as per a section of the US Immigration and Nationality Act, which prohibits anybody who was “responsible for, or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom” from entering that country.