Amid the furore and consternation from the BJP over an old video where veteran Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar is heard advocating the need to show respect to Pakistan while pointing to its nuclear arsenal; Chief Minister Revnath Reddy on Friday raised fresh questions over the Pulwama terror attack in 2019 and the retaliatory airstrikes on a terror hideout in Balakote, deep inside Pakistan.
Speaking to reporters in Telangana on Friday, CM Reddy accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of trying to reap ‘political benefits’ from the horrific ambush of a CRPF convoy that left 40 personnel dead and the airstrikes that followed.
Laying the blame on the BJP-led NDA at the Centre for ‘failing’ to prevent the Pulwama attack, the Telangana CM said, “For Modi, everything is political. Everything is about winning elections. His way of thinking is not good for the country. The time has come for the country to be rid of Modi and the BJP. Ask them anything and they will respond with ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (glory to Lord Ram). They failed to prevent the Pulwama attack. What was the IB doing? What was our intelligence network doing?”
Claiming that PM Modi tried to derive political and electoral benefits from the Pulwama attack and the retaliatory action by the Indian Air Force (IAF), Reddy said, “Modi-ji attempted to extract political and electoral benefits from the airstrikes after the Pulwama incident. I want to ask him: What were you doing? Why did you let it happen? What did you do to boost the country’s internal security? Why did you not take the help of the agencies at your disposal such as the IB and R&AW? It was your failure. Nobody knows for sure if the airstrike, as was claimed, took place. If the responsibility of ensuring the country’s internal security was with us, we wouldn’t have left it in anyone’s hands.”
Earlier, on Friday, veteran leader Aiyar found himself in the soup again after a clip of an old interview surfaced in which he is heard saying that Pakistan, as a nuclear-armed country, deserves respect. He also advocated the need for India to reengage with its neighbour.
Earlier, senior Congress leader and Karnataka Chief Minister M Veerappa Moily questioned the Pulwama attack and labelled the country’s retaliatory action as a ‘bogus’ claim, adding that PM Modi used them for political mileage.
“The 2024 elections are different from 2014 and 2019. In 2019, Modi (government) claimed to have carried out the airstrikes. One of the former governors of Jammu and Kashmir, Mr. (Satyapal) Malik, who was with the BJP earlier, called the claim of the airstrikes post Pulwama as bogus. Riding on this bogus strike claim, Modi came back to power in 2019,” Moily said.
The Pulwana attack went down on February 14, 2019, after a suicide bomber rammed an IED-laden vehicle into a CRPF bus.
Days after the attack, on February 26, the Indian Air Force carried out airstrikes on a JeM terror hideout in Pakistan’s Balakot, killing a ‘large number’ of terrorists and destroying their infrastructure.
Pakistan’s efforts to launch counter-strikes on Indian military installations in Jammu and Kashmir were thwarted by an alert IAF.
Striking back on February 26, 2019, IAF fighters targeted an advanced terror training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammed in Balakot. (ANI)
