New Delhi/Ahmedabad, Aug.11 (ANI): The spokesperson of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Ram Madhav, on Saturday came out in support of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, saying his praise of Janata Dal-United-led Bihar as opposed to BJP-led Gujarat had been interpreted wrongly.
Bhagwat had praised the development model of Bihar and had said that it was ahead of Gujarat in terms of governance and development.
Bhagwat said this while interacting with foreign correspondents at an August 9 news conference.
Madhav said it was a very general observation.
"The way Bhagwatji's simple observation about the development that is taking place in the various parts of the country is being interpreted in a very false manner as being way of rating one state above the other. Bhagwatji has not rated any one state as something ahead of the other. It was a very general observation that in the country, besides Gujarat, besides Madhya Pradesh, there are other states, which are also doing well and people in different areas will have different perceptions about the development of their own state, their own region. It was a very ordinary observation and to interpret it as though he gave a preferential rating of state is totally wrong," said Madhav in New Delhi.
However, Bhagwat added that his opinion was that of the common man and not his personal view.
Madhav said Bhagwat's simple observations have been falsified deliberately.Interpretation of his views is totally false, and I have reasons to believe that this falsification of his very simple observations is being done deliberately," said Madhav.
Recently, a section of media had reported that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had asked BJP chief Nitin Gadkari not to project Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as the preferred prime ministerial candidate of the opposition for the 2014 general elections, as he feared it could alienate Muslims.
Gujarat goes to polls in December this year and Modi is likely to secure his third consecutive win in the assembly elections.
However, the president of the Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC), Arjun Modhwadia, said everybody is aware about the condition of Gujarat, but added that Modi is not being removed because he is the fund manager for the RSS and the BJP.
"As per the figures, it indicates clearly that the GDP growth rate of Bihar is much better then Gujarat and I have no knowledge about the good administration in Bihar, but from the starting we have been saying that there is no good administration in Gujarat and many other leaders of Bharatiya Janata Party have said that fear prevails in Gujarat, mini emergency is going on and political commitments are not being fulfilled but inspite of all this Modi is not being removed because whether it is RSS or BJP, Modi has been the biggest fund manager for them," said Modhwadia in Ahmedabad.
Bihar is no longer the butt of jokes, ever since Nitish Kumar took charge of the ruined state in 2005 and began to turn it around-winning such respect that he stands a decent chance of one day becoming prime minister of India.
When India launched reforms to open up its state-stifled economy 20 years ago, many states surged ahead, leaving behind the 3.5 percent "Hindu rate of growth" that had plagued the decades after the country's independence from Britain in 1947, and with it Bihar.
Bihar is still India's most impoverished state: landlocked, not blessed with resources and prone to catastrophic flooding, its annual per-capita income of about $400 is just a third of the national average. Its 104 million overwhelmingly farm-dependent people have India's worst literacy rate and the lowest proportion of households with electricity, and the state scores miserably on the U.N.'s Human Development Index.
With the improvement in law and order, there has been tentative interest in setting up industries in Bihar, which is 90 percent dependent on agriculture after the mineral-rich region of Jharkhand was hived off into a separate state in 2000.
New industries in Bihar can receive up to 300 percent of capital invested in VAT refunds over 10 years, in addition to a host of other incentives. (ANI)
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