Patna: The people of Bihar will respond in the assembly polls Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “DNA slur” about Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said here on Thursday.
“It was wrong to say that there was something wrong with the DNA of Nitish Kumar. It was an insult to Bihar,” the Aam Aadmi Party leader told a seminar organised by the Bihar government on good governance.
“The people of Bihar will reply to it in the assembly elections,” he added.
Kejriwal said the Bharatiya Janata Party had committed the same mistake during Delhi’s assembly elections by questioning his ‘gotra’.
“Now they have raised the question of DNA… People will reply to them.”
Kejriwal supported Nitish Kumar’s demand of special category status for Bihar and described the Rs.1.25 lakh crore package for the state announced by Modi as an attempt to buy over the people of Bihar.
Kejriwal, who shared the dais with Nitish Kumar, lauded his government’s good governance. “People in Delhi also talk about Nitish Kumar’s good governance.”
He said he was happy to know that nearly 11 crore people had benefited from the the Right to Service Act started by the Bihar government.
Kejriwal dubbed Modi’s ‘Clean India’ campaign a failure, and said youths were losing faith in the Modi government.
He also hinted that electricity prices in Delhi may become cheaper.
In a direct attack on Modi, he said people were promised before the Lok Sabha election that black money would be brought back to the country, and now they were being told to do yoga.
Kejriwal said while millions of rupees had been spent on advertisements related to the “Swachh Bharat” drive, “not a single lane was clean”.
While not visibly taking sides in the Bihar election, he said people in the state had two models to choose from — the central and the Delhi governments.
Praising his own six-month-old government, Kejriwal said he and the AAP were made fun of when they spoke about providing cheap electricity ahead of the Delhi election in February.
The people of Delhi, he said, were happy with the subsidies provided on power bills. “It is possible electricity may become further cheaper.”
He claimed that if assembly elections were held in Delhi now, the AAP — which bagged 67 of the 70 seats in February — would win all 70 seats.
Saying “negative politics” and “politics of abuse” were losing their appeal, Kejriwal added that the attraction of the young vis-a-vis the Modi government was waning.
Earlier, he arrived here on Thursday on a day-long visit.
He was shown black flags by three people who claimed to be supporters of social activist Anna Hazare, police said, adding all three were detained.
Nitish Kumar, the chief guest at Delhi government’s cultural programme last week, had invited Kejriwal to Bihar and speak on the public delivery system.
Kejriwal and Nitish Kumar will visit Bodh Gaya to pray at the Mahabodhi temple, considered the birthplace of Buddhism.
Both chief ministers have come together against Modi on the issue of centre-state relations.
–IANS