Goa politician Utpal Parrikar on Tuesday slammed Congress’s Digivijaya Singh for doubting the authenticity of India’s surgical strikes, saying such remarks are not surprising to come from a person who called terrorist Osama bin Laden “Osama ji”.

Speaking during the Rahul Gandhi-led Bharat Jodo Yatra in Jammu on Monday, Singh had expressed doubts over the cross-border military operation. “They (Centre) talk about surgical strikes and that they have killed so many of them but there is no proof. They are ruling by peddling a bundle of lies,” he had said.

In September 2016, India conducted surgical strikes across the Line of Control (LoC) as a response to a terrorist attack on an Army base in the Uri sector of Jammu and Kashmir. Utpal Parrikar’s father and senior BJP leader Manohar Parrikar was the country’s defence minister then.

“What Digvijaya Singh has said is not surprising, he has been consistently saying such things, be it about surgical strike or calling one of the most dreaded terrorist 'Osama ji',” said Utpal Parrikar.

Following the killing of the then Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in the US, by American forces in Pakistan, Singh was reported to have addressed him as “Osama ji”.

Utpal Parrikar said, “The Congress party has really become a congress for such people at its upper echelon and they are there to have allegiance to a particular family above everything else.” “Unfortunately for them and fortunately for the country, people have realized this and are dutifully rejecting them at the general elections,” said Utpal Parrikar, who had unsuccessfully contested last year’s Goa assembly polls as an independent candidate.

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