Home minister Amit Shah on Tuesday hailed the mothers of Haryana for sending their sons to the armed forces but sidestepped references to the death of four soldiers in a militant strike in Jammu's Doda.

Shah was addressing a convention to pay respect to OBCs in Haryana, which goes to the polls this year.

"Haryana is known for three things from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and Kamakhya to Dwarka," Shah said, addressing the Backward Classes Samman Sammelan at Mahendragarh, counting Haryana as among the states that send the most number of youths to the armed forces.

"The mothers of Haryana have sent their sons in such large numbers to the armed forces that the state is relatively the highest in contributing soldiers to the army," Shah said, also hailing the state for winning medals in sports and its booming agriculture.

Soon after the praise, Shah switched focus on swaying the large OBC community in the otherwise Jat-dominated state. The home minister credited the BJP for giving the state its first OBC chief minister, Nayab Singh Saini, reiterating that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was an OBC and going on to slam the Congress for being "anti-OBC".

Shah, who in the past had claimed that the "bold decision" of the abrogation of Article 370 had dealt a body blow to militancy in Jammu and Kashmir, didn’t spare a syllable on the four soldiers killed in Doda.

The BJP's number two has been quoted saying that "security forces' decisive control over terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir" after the revocation of the special status has been the biggest achievement of the Modi government.

"When elections come, the Congress starts shouting OBCs, OBCs…but the fact is that the Congress has always been anti-backwards while PM Modi has ensured the OBCs get their rights," Shah said in Mahendragarh.

Accusing Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi of being "anti-backwards", Shah said that while the mother kept a report on reservation for OBCs in the cold storage in 1980, the son had "firmly opposed" the Mandal commission report in 1990.

Haryana goes to the polls later this year and Shah appears to have taken the mantle of the party's chief election strategist yet again, seeking to play the OBC card to trump the Congress's rise in the state. The Congress stunned the BJP by winning five of the 10 Lok Sabha seats this year. The BJP had, however, won all the 10 seats in 2019 and all but one in 2014.