Days after Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat said that girls and boys were being radicalised in Kashmir, Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh Wednesday said the children of Jammu and Kashmir are nationalists, but they are sometimes being motivated in the wrong direction. Singh was speaking at the NCC Republic Day Camp in Delhi.
The kids of Jammu Kashmir are nationalists. They shouldn’t be seen in any other way. Youngsters are youngsters only. Sometimes, the way they should be motivated, people do not motivate them. In fact, they are motivated in the wrong direction,” PTI quoted Singh as saying.“That is why the kids should not be blamed for this. The ones who are wrongly motivating them should be blamed. The ones who are motivating them in the wrong direction are the culprits,” he added.The defence minister also hit out at Pakistan saying Indian values consider all religions equal, and that is why the country is secular and never became a theocratic state like Pakistan.“We (India) said we would not discriminate among religions. Why did we do that? Our neighbouring country has declared that their state has a religion. They have declared themselves a theocratic state. We didn’t declare so,” Rajnath said according to PTI.Rajnath called America a theocratic country as well. “Even America is a theocratic country. India is not a theocratic country. Why? Because our saints and seers did not just consider the people living within our borders as part of the family but called everyone living in the world as one family.”
Asserting that India never declared its religion would be Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist, Rajnath said people of all religions could live here. “They gave the slogan of ‘Vasudev Kutumbakam’ — the whole world is one family. This message has gone to the whole world from here only,” he said.