Chief Minister Revanath Reddy expressed doubt on air strike on Pak terrorist camp after Pulwama attack

Hyderabad: Amidst the hue and cry in the BJP over an old video, where veteran Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar is heard pointing towards Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and advocating the need to show respect towards it; Chief Minister Revanath Reddy on Friday raised fresh questions over the Pulwama terror attack in 2019 and the retaliatory air strike on a terrorist hideout in Balakot inside Pakistan. Speaking to reporters in Telangana on Friday, CM Reddy accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of trying to take ‘political mileage’ from the gruesome attack on a CRPF convoy and the subsequent air strikes. Blaming the BJP-led NDA at the Center for ‘failing’ to prevent the Pulwama attack, the Telangana CM said, “For Modi, everything is political. Everything is about winning elections. His thinking His method is not good for the country.” The time has come for the country to get rid of Modi and BJP. Ask them anything and they will respond with ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (Glory to Lord Ram). They failed to stop the Pulwama attack. What was our intelligence network doing?” Claiming that PM Modi tried to make political and electoral gains from the Pulwama attack and the Indian Air Force (IAF)’s retaliatory action, Reddy said, “Modi-ji tried to make political and electoral gains from the air strikes after the Pulwama incident. I want to ask him: Why did you not take the help of agencies like IB and RAW? We also do not know with certainty that the air strike took place as was claimed, if we had the responsibility of ensuring the internal security of the country, we would not have left it in anyone’s hands. Earlier on Friday, senior leader Aiyar was again in the news after a clip of an old interview surfaced in which he can be heard saying that Pakistan deserves respect as a nuclear-armed country. He also advocated the need for India to reconnect with its neighbour. Earlier, senior Congress leader and Karnataka Chief Minister M Veerappa Moily raised questions over the Pulwama attack and termed the country’s retaliation as a ‘fake’ claim and said PM Modi used it for political gains. “The 2024 elections are different from 2014 and 2019. In 2019, the Modi (government) claimed to have carried out air strikes. One of the former governors of Jammu and Kashmir, Mr (Satyapal) Malik, who was earlier with the BJP, Calling the airstrike claim after Pulwama fake, riding on this fake attack claim, Modi came back to power in 2019,” Moily said. The Pulwana attack occurred on February 14, 2019, when a suicide bomber rammed an IED-laden vehicle into a CRPF bus. A few days after the attack, on 26 February, the Indian Air Force carried out air strikes on a Jaish-e-Mohammed terror hideout in Balakot, Pakistan, killing ‘a large number’ of terrorists and destroying their infrastructure. Pakistan’s attempts to launch retaliatory strikes on Indian military installations in Jammu and Kashmir were foiled by an alert Indian Air Force. In a retaliatory strike on February 26, 2019, IAF fighters targeted an advanced Jaish-e-Mohammed terror training camp in Balakot.