FIFA World Cup 2014: Brazil to get Indian stamps as mementos

NEW DELHI: India may not have a team competing at the FIFA World Cup, but that doesn’t mean that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would let the participating teams forget their fans in India. At a function to release a stamp issued by the department of post and telegraph, on the FIFA world cup, Modi said as much to officials.

“As the ceremony was underway, the Prime Minister joked that the stamp was commemorating a tournament where India was not a participant, only because of the popularity of the game,” said an official present there. “He said that the 32 teams should be made aware that they had fans back here rooting for them just as passionately as their own countrymen,” he added.

Immediately, Modi turned the idea around and asked telecommunications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and officials accompanying him to co-ordinate with the ministry of external affairs to make sure this is done. “The idea is to frame copies of these stamps and through the Indian ambassador to Brazil make sure that each team gets a memento from fans in India,” said the source. The telecommunication ministry has decided to follow through on the Prime Minister’s suggestion. “We are getting in touch with the concerned people in this regard,” said the official.

Modi has, significantly, been invited by the Brazilian President Dilma Roussef to watch the finals of the tournament, a day before the BRICS summit being held in that country. This promotion of football also assumes significance in a laudatory blog on the sport written by RSS sarkaryavah Daatratreya Hosabele just last week. In his blog, Hosabele had said that football was not just an “ancient sport” played in India and in Greece, but that it was a true leveller, with footballs fans in every strata of society, unlike say other games which were more class specific.

Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is known for his very vocal championing of the national sport of hockey, for the Prime Minister and the RSS it seems, football is the name of the game.