Hyderabad, Jan. 9: The Gujarat riots cast a shadow on the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas here when a doctor said to be close to Narendra Modi was honoured today.

Four NRIs from the US protested the decision to include the name of Sudhir M. Parikh, a doctor from New Jersey, in a list of 11 who were awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman.

The NRIs also sought to associate Parikh with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which had organised a gaurav yatra for Gujarat chief minister Modi in the US. But America denied Modi a visa, preventing him from participating in the event though he addressed the audience there on video.

The four NRIs asked President A.P.J Abdul Kalam, who was to give away the awards, how Parikh could be honoured. “How can you honour a person who has the blood of Godhra on his hands?” one of them asked.

When the NRIs walked up to the podium shouting “shame, shame”, they were taken away by policemen.

Parikh has denied personal acquaintance with Modi or the VHP. “I had organised a similar felicitation to the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, as a functionary of the Indian Association,” he said.

This is not the first time that questions have been raised regarding the decision to honour Parikh, who heads the Indian Association and is also a trustee of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin.

Last Friday, when minister for overseas Indian affairs Oscar Fernandes was speaking to the media on the NRI event, Parikh’s name cropped up.

Fernandes skirted controversy, saying “the selection of the personalities was made on the recommendations of a committee on the basis of their contribution to their motherland and there was no room for politics”.

Modi, who was at the convention yesterday, boasted that the growth chart of Gujarat was comparable only with China and Japan.

But the Gujarat chief minister drew flak from his Andhra Pradesh counterpart after he criticised the state’s Congress government for being “soft towards terrorists and Maoists”.

A miffed Rajasekhar Reddy said “a man whose regime has witnessed the killings of thousands of innocents in the post-Godhra clashes cannot throw stones at other states”.