Gonda (Uttar Pradesh): Close on the heels of the BJP-led NDA’s thumping victory in the Lok Sabha elections, news spread that a woman in Uttar Pradesh named her son Narendra Damodardas Modi after Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he was born on the same day the results were announced, May 23.

Now, a month later, the woman, Mehnaz Begum (25) claims that she regrets naming her son Narendra Modi and wants to name him Aftab Alam Mohd Modi, but to do that, she needs help filing a revised affidavit.

Mehnaz accused her first cousin, a journalist with Hindi daily Hindustan in Gonda, for convincing her to commit the ‘fraud’. She explained that the child was actually born on May 12, days before the election results were announced.

Superintendent of the Community Health Centre at Wazirganj, Dr Ashutosh Shukla told The Sunday Express that the child was born on May 12 and said that it was a normal delivery. She added that Mehnaz was discharged on May 13.

Mehnaz says that she did not know that the false news would become such a big deal. “I fell for what my cousin told me,” she said.

She alleged that her first cousin, Mushtaq Ahmed convinced her to name the child after Modi. She claimed that he also spread the word that the child was born on May 23. He then shared the byline with senior reporter Qamar Abbas in the Hindustan’s Lucknow edition on May 25.

Mehnaz claimed that she is illiterate and doesn’t even know who Narendra Modi is. “He made me mug up a short speech to tell reporters about my son being born on May 23 and me naming him after Prime Minister Modi,” she explained.

Her cousin, the Editor of Hindustan (Lucknow) and Qamar Abbas, however, denied the allegations. They claimed that the story was verified before it was published.

Mehnaz also claimed that her husband, who works as a mason in Dubai, is angry about the whole controversy and has not sent her any money for June. She explained that the house she lives in belongs to her father-in-law and she doesn’t have any other source of income.

She alleged that some people from her community have boycotted them because they had issues with her son being named after a Hindu leader, however, the village pradhan’s son, said that no one has boycotted her family. “She is saying that because she was caught in a lie,” he said.