All-India Congress Committee general secretary in charge of Orissa affairs B.K. Hariprasad has been caught on the wrong foot by stating that Australian missionary Graham Stewart Staines and his two minor sons were killed during the Naveen Patnaik government. “B.K. Hariprasad should brush up his knowledge about Orissa.
Actually, the Staines were killed in January 1999 during the J.B. Patnaik government while the BJD came to power in 2000,” senior BJD leader and state panchayati raj minister Kalpataru Das said on Thursday. Mr Hariprasad, while addressing a rally in Bhawanipatna on Wednesday, had said that the BJD-BJP coalition headed by Naveen Patnaik tried to unleash a reign of terror among the minorities in Orissa by patronising the murder of Graham Stewart Staines and his sons.
The AICC leader, although did not mention the name of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, also said that “another chief minister belonging to the BJP also adopted similar terror strategy in Gujarat.”