A day after BJP’s PM nominee Narendra Modi slammed the Bihar Chief Minister and his Government for being soft on the issue of terrorism, due to which, Bihar has become safe haven for terrorists, Nitish Kumar on Tuesday questioned the ‘charges’ made against him.
“Any incident of terrorism is a cause of worry for one and all but I wonder that if, on the basis of one or two incidents, the State is being called a haven of terrorism what shall we say about several such incidents happening in Gujarat and other parts of the country,” asked Kumar while adding that “everybody knows who got benefited from the serial blasts at the Patna rally”.
He also explained that his Government had taken both the attacks — one in Patna rally and second at the Buddhist temple of Bodh Gaya— as a challenge and took necessary steps to prevent recurrence of such events. “But playing politics in the name of terrorism when elections are around the corner is a shameless attempt,” he told mediapersons. While making reference of the “secularism” which was used by Narendra Modi at his rally in Muzaffarpur, Nitish Kumar said that secularism was, in fact, essence of the country’s tradition and respect for all religions couldn’t be done only by uttering good words “rather there is a need to sincerely work for the welfare of all communities.”
Commenting on the development issue of Gujarat and Bihar, Kumar said everybody knew that developing Bihar, a landlocked State, was more difficult than a State which was already developed and situated on sea coast. “Everybody knows the truth of his development through statistics and existence of a large number of people below the poverty line and suffering from malnutrition,” Nitish took a dig at Modi.