Patna: The BJP today hit back at Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar for commenting on its national president Amit Shah's imprisonment in some criminal cases and claimed that Shah had been falsely implicated by the erstwhile Congress-led UPA government.
“Shah was falsely implicated by Congress and now he has been discharged in all the cases,” senior BJP leader and former deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi said in a series of tweets.
He was responding to Kumar's barb at Shah that he must have learnt all bad things during imprisonment in connection with criminal cases. Kumar's comment came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's observation at a public meeting in Gaya that one learns only bad things in jail.
In a rejoinder to Kumar, Sushil Modi asked him whether he could say the same thing about the RJD supremo who was convicted by a special court in connection with multi-crore fodder scam two years ago.
On the Chief Minister's claim that Bihar was no longer a BIMARU state, Modi, a former Finance minister in the Nitish Kumar government, asked Kumar why he was asking for special package for Bihar if it has come out of BIMARU syndrome.
The senior BJP leader rebuked Kumar for taking offence to the Prime Minister's reference of BIMARU states and said the acronym should not have been taken for ill-health (‘bimar') as it points to backwardness of these states by making a word out of first letter of each state.
Kumar should correct his ‘weak general knowledge' as word BIMARU was used for four backward states Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, he said.
On the senior JD(U) leader asking the BJP to keep its word on decriminalisation of politics, Modi charged the former with “patronising” criminals and taking their “help” to come to power given the fact that there were a dozen MLAs with criminal background in the ruling party.
