Hitting back, BJP asserted that no one can give a fatwa on who is secular and joining the issue, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat wondered why a 'Hinduwadi' should not become the Prime Minister.
After Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's strong pitch for a "secular" Prime Ministerial candidate for NDA in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, his party general secretary Shivanand Tiwari took the anti-Modi tone in JD-U to a new decibel.
NDA cannot come to power with a "fanatic face" and JD-U will not compromise on principles on which it had joined the Opposition alliance in 1996, Tiwari told reporters here.
He said that surveys indicate that had the former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee dismissed Modi government in Gujarat for the post-Godhara riots in 2002, NDA would have still been in power and not lost the 2004 general elections.
"People who voted for BJP due to liberal face of Vajpayee went away from it after Gujarat riots and the floating votes went to Congress because people do not accept fanatic politics.
"Those people in BJP who want the party to come to power will have to realise that they cannot do it by putting a fanatic face in the front," Tiwari said in an apparent reference to Modi.
He said history tells that whenever India has been ruled by secular forces, it has developed and whenever fascist forces have taken over, it has suffered. He gave the examples of Akbar and Ashoka on the one hand and Aurangzeb on the other.(MORE)
