A 'sutiable' end to the controversy

Minutes before the hammer fell on the three-day auction for India's most talked about suit, a diamond baron upped the bid to Rs.4.31 crore on Feb 20, 2015 to bag the bandhgala with the words Narendra Damodardas Modi woven in as pinstripes.

Surat-based Dharmanandan Diamonds, a Rs.5,000-crore company , jumped into the fray on the last day to walk away with the suit that the PM wore during US President Barack Obama's visit to India. It won over a bid of Rs.5 crore as that came two minutes past the 5 pm deadline and was disqualified.

The gallery resonated with chants of `Modi, Modi' as soon as district collector Rajender Kumar declared the winner of the auction. Dharmanandan Diamonds began by bidding Rs.1.61 crore. Eventually , Lalji Patel, owner of the company , bettered an offer of Rs.3.61 crore made at 4.35 pm. Dharmanandan Diamonds, which won the auction for PM Narendra Modi's pinstripe suit, made five of the 11 bids that were received on Friday , the last day of the auction.

While it was almost certain since Day 1 that the diamond industry would walk away with the suit, victory did not come easily as builders like Sanjay Movaliya, Jayanti Eklara and Lavji Badshah put up a fierce fight. In fact, Badshah narrowly missed when his Rs.5 crore offer was rejected by the district collector as it came two minutes past the 5 pm deadline.

Two days ago, diamond barons spearheading the Surat Diamond Bourse (SDB) project had decided to make the highest bid to bag the suit which they want to keep as a memorabilia in the SDB complex. Dharmanandan Diamonds is one of the founding members of SDB, which is touted to be the world's largest diamond bourse.

As the monogrammed Modi suit notched over Rs.4 crore at an auction, Congress upped the ante against the Prime Minister by saying the value of the attire had been vastly underestimated. “The PM has much more to clarify than we initially thought and demanded. We did not realize that it was a suit that cost over Rs.4 crore”, former Union minister and Rajya Sabha MP Kumari Selja said.

To rub it in, she said the suit was being auctioned in the name of generating funds to clean the Ganga but the cloud over the clothing suggested that it was a way to “wash away the sins” in the holy river. “The Ganga should not be polluted by such money”, she said. Senior party leader Imran Kidwai said it was an irony that “the man who called himself the `chowkidar' of the country wore a suit costing Rs. 4 crore”