Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar
Hours after Prime Minister
Narendra Modi's rally in Gaya, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar offered a point-by-point rebuttal to his claims, making yet another appeal to what he earlier called the "Bihari Asmita (Bihari pride)".
PM Modi addressed a rally in Gaya today ahead of the assembly election in the state which will be held by October, where he launched a blistering attack on the state government..
"The Prime Minister first pointed fingers at Bihar's DNA, now he called the state sick," Mr Kumar said. 'I think he has forgotten that Bihar is not called Bimaru anymore."
Reacting to PM Modi's dig that Mr Kumar's party, the JD(U) stood for "Janata-ka Daman or Utpiran (subjugation and torture of people), Mr Kumar said in that context, "India still remembers Mr Vajpayee's advice to you to fulfill your Rajdharma (the ruler's duty) in 2002 (during the Gujarat riots)."
Earlier, hitting back further over PM Modi's dig that an RJD-JD(U) government can be a disaster for Bihar since RJD chief Lalu Prasad had spent time in jail, he tweeted, "Please tell us what bad habits your party president Amit Shah brought from jail."
Regarding his comments on Twitter, Mr Kumar said the BJP was a Twitter government which was not in the habit of listening and he had joined Twitter as it was the "only way to make the Prime Minister listen".
Talking about the two states whose developments
PM Modi had cited as exemplary, he said Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh had got rid of the Bimaru tag over the last few years.
"I want to ask them whose government was it at the Centre?" he said, indicating that if the states had prospered it was because of the cooperation from the then UPA government. Drawing a parallel, he said the BJP government, from which Bihar had high hopes, has done little for the state.
"You said if the people of Bihar take one step, you will take a 'Sawa Kadam'. What kind of a step is that (sawa means 1.25)? The kind of things you are saying, it leaves me with no option but to quote this hoarding I saw, where the BJP was called "Badka Jhootha Party (big liar party)."