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Salman Khurshid backs Nitish, says prime minister must be a secular | Backing Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's statement
in which he asked his alliance partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to name
a prime ministerial candidate with secular credentials, Law Minister Salman Khurshid
on Tuesday said that India is a secular country and our prime minister should
be a secular. "Nitish Kumar's statement is a welcome thing. We are a secular country
and our prime minister has to be a secular," Khurshid told media here. "Whosoever
becomes the prime minister, they are responsible for the whole nation. They can't
be biased," he added. Seeking to rest all speculation, Nitish Kumar in an interview
to a national daily has asserted that he is not in the prime ministerial race.
However, without taking names, he has also made it clear that JD (U) will not
accept the leadership of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. He insisted that
the NDA should name its Prime Ministerial candidate before the 2014 Lok Sabha
polls and the candidate must have secular credentials and a liberal frame of mind.
"NDA should declare its candidate in advance. This leader should be acceptable
to every constituent of the alliance. To me, the leader of the coalition should
have secular credentials. It should be someone who has absolute faith in democratic
values," he said. "In a multi-religious and multi-lingual country like ours, the
leader should not have rough edges in his personality. An alliance can win the
confidence of the people only if the leader is seen as accommodating," he added.
Nitish Kumar's candid comments appear to be aimed at setting the rules of the
game before the NDA starts to mull over the strategy to take on the UPA in 2014.
The latest war-of-words seems to have been sparked off by Modi's recent comments
on Bihar . Speaking at a public rally in Rajkot , Modi had reportedly said, "
Bihar , at one point of time, was a political and spiritual leader of the country,
but it slipped into socio-economical backwardness ever since the casteist leadership
took centre stage." |
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