Rahul Gandhi meets debt-ridden dead farmer's family

Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday met the family of a debt-ridden farmer who committed suicide in a Punjab village last week after his crops were destroyed by unseasonal rain.

After staying with the bereaved family in Dadumajra village near Chunni Kalan in Fategarh Sahib for nearly 15 minutes, Gandhi headed to the picturesque hill station of Kasauli in Himachal Pradesh to meet his elderly aunt.

Surjit Singh, a 60-year-old debt-ridden farmer, who met the Congress vice president on April 28 after his crops were destroyed by unseasonal rains, committed suicide on June 10 by consuming poison.

Clad in a white long 'kurta' and blue jeans, Gandhi spent the time with the family of the farmer and hugged the widow.

"Rahul-ji came here specially to attend the 'bhog' of my father. He promised to raise the plight of farmers in the country," his son Kulwinder Singh told reporters.

Gandhi had last month taken his fight for the farmers and had boarded a train from Delhi to Ambala in Haryana to see their condition. He also visited Punjab to look at the situation of the farmers.

Official sources said after meeting the farmer, Gandhi reached Kasauli, some 60 km from here, to meet his aunt Shobha Nehru, who was married to Jawaharlal Nehru's cousin B.K. Nehru.

Born in Budapest in Hungary, Shobha Nehru married into the Nehru family in 1935, after she met B.K. Nehru in Oxford University as a student.

B.K. Nehru, one of India's most distinguished civil servants of the post-independent India, died on Oct 31, 2001 at the age of 92.