Patna, 26 August

Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Tuesday asked Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to "apologise to the people of Bihar" for inviting Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy to their 'Voter Adhikar Yatra'.

The senior BJP leader made the remark at a function, organised by the party's youth wing Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), on a day when Reddy was spotted with the siblings in Supaul district.

Pradhan said, "Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi should apologise to the people of Bihar. Revanth Reddy had said the DNA of Bihar is inferior. RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, who is with them in the Yatra, should also apologise".

Reddy had reportedly made the remark a couple of years ago when he had said his predecessor, K Chandrasekar Rao, the BRS president, "has a Bihari DNA" which was not of the same quality as "Telangana DNA".

Pradhan, who is a former BJP national general secretary for Bihar, also charged the INDIA bloc with "spreading rumours" of "Votechori" (theft of votes) and, in an apparent defence of deletion of names of lakhs of people from the electoral rolls, remarked "our country is not a shelter (dharmashala) for Rohingyas and Bangladeshis".

"Lots of youngsters are present here. I would suggest that they do a search on Google, Grok and ChatGPT on Vote chori in Bihar. The results would throw up instances of large-scale booth capturing, which was the order of the day when RJD and Congress enjoyed power", alleged Pradhan.

He exhorted the cadres to work towards achieving victory for the NDA in the upcoming assembly polls and ensure "the march towards progress continues under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar".

Outside Gyan Bhavan, the venue of the function, workers of the BJYM roughed up activists of NSUI, the students' wing of the Congress, who were staging a demonstration carrying black flags.

Later, NSUI in charge for Bihar Shashwat Shekhar told reporters, "Being a law student, I am aware that no illegality is involved in staging a protest with black flags. But BJP is indulging in hooliganism".

He added, "We wanted to draw the attention of Pradhan, the Union Minister for Education, towards our long-standing demands like central status to Patna University and local students getting weightage in admissions to central varsities situated in the state".

In his speech, Pradhan called upon youth to aim at becoming "job creators instead of job seekers" and help the nation realise "Prime Minister Narendra Modi's dream of making India the number one country in the world".

He also spoke on sustainable growth with solar power and hydrogen replacing sources of energy, which led to heavy carbon emission.

Turning towards cabinet colleague Giriraj Singh, the Minister for Textiles, he remarked, "It is great that you are now making fabric out of banana skin. Bio waste is something that we must tap in a big way".

Earlier, echoing similar sentiments at the convocation ceremony of IIT, Patna, the Education minister also called for imparting training in the mother tongue, pointing out "neither Israel, nor Japan nor Germany ask their engineers to study in English medium".

He also said, "Bihar has a huge opportunity in PM Modi's thrust on vocal for local. Products of Bihar, if these reach the world's far-off corners, would bring prosperity to the state and, in turn, benefit the nation".

Pradhan also made a mention of his meeting with Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, the JD(U) president, earlier in the day.

"I have had an old relationship with Nitish ji, who has been diligently working towards achieving PM Modi's goal of sustainable development. The Union government has tried to give a boost to the cultivation of makhana, a speciality of this state, by setting up a Makhana board", said Pradhan.

He added, "I would urge students who have come here from other parts of the country to familiarise themselves with the local culture as much as possible. This is the land which gave birth to Chanakya and Chandragupta Maurya".