HYDERABAD: External Affairs Minister and senior BJP leader Sushma Swaraj trained her guns at Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao for ‘doubting’ if any terrorist had been killed in the strikes conducted by the Indian Air Force in Balakot, Pakistan. Swaraj slammed the TRS chief for believing Pakistan’s claims and questioned if he was worth the people’s mandate. Swaraj made these statements while campaigning for G Kishan Reddy and N Ramchander Rao, the party’s candidates from Secunderabad and Malkajgiri respectively.
Speaking in the presence of senior party leaders Bandaru Dattatreya and K Laxman, Swaraj said that the Balakot air strikes were a targeted and precise attack on terrorist camps in Pakistan. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced that terrorists were indeed killed in the attacks. The nation has congratulated our brave armed forces,” she explained, adding that as many as 17 countries had supported the strikes, admitting that they were preemptive in nature.
The Union minister said that she was astonished that ‘people like KCR’ were claiming no terrorists had been killed. She wanted to know how the Chief Minister could take Pakistan’s side on the matter. “When a person chooses to believe statements of Pakistani leaders over Indian leaders, I want to know if such a person can be worth your vote? Can he be of any value to the people?” she queried, eliciting responses like ‘shame’ and ‘no’ from the party’s supporters.
Swaraj said that such strikes could have been in the country’s interest had they been done after the 26/11 terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008. “If the Indian government (UPA) had wanted, it could have cornered Pakistan internationally by taking other countries into confidence. But that opportunity was wasted. Instead, the government wrote to Pakistan, asking it to act against terrorists,” she said.