Karnataka CM Kumaraswamy accuses PM Modi of not sharing details of Balakot air strikes

The remarks come a day after Modi’s attack on him during the PM’s Belagavi and Chikkodi election meetings on Thursday.

Modi took on Kumaraswamy for saying the matter of air strikes on terror camps in Pakistan’s Balakot should not be over publicised “fearing the vote bank would get angry.”

“He (Modi) publicises it as if he himself carried out the air strike and nobody had ever crossed the Pakistan border in the past,” the chief minister said.

He said the prime minister had been projecting that Pakistan was trembling with fear. “Did Narendra Modi form Bangladesh? It is Indira Gandhi’s gift. What have you (Modi) done?” Kumaraswamy said.

The JD(S) leader added that he found Indira Gandhi a bigger leader than Modi.

On Modi’s jibe that the Congress and JD(S) projected the attack inside Balakot in Pakistan as if it was something in Bagalkot in Karnataka as the two parties thought India could not dare to do so, the chief minister said, “We have not seen Balakot.

“You (Modi) must have seen it. You only went there with a shawl to celebrate an event with the (then) prime minister (Nawaz Sharif). What discussions you had there? What harmony you could establish with the Pakistan prime minister whom you gave the shawl?” he said.

Referring to Modi ridiculing his purported remark that people who were unable to get two square meals a day go to the defence services, the JD(S) leader said, “I did say that since Modi does not have the ability to give jobs to the youth, people go to the Army to sustain their families and survive somehow.

“I spoke about the poverty of the families. I told him not to play with the lives of such youths. But they twisted my words and they twisted my statement. BJP is expert in that,” he added.