Patna, Dec 19 Amid criticism of the Nitish Kumar government over the hooch tragedy in Bihar's Saran, Lalan Singh, the national president of JD(U) attacked the BJP while citing data from other states and said that Madhya Pradesh topped the chart of deaths.
Lalan Singh, while tagging Sushil Kumar Modi, asked him in a tweet to look into the data from other states too before levelling allegations on the Bihar government.
"Making and selling of spurious liquor is a criminal act. It is not only the incident in Saran but it happened in the entire country. You should look at the data before speaking to others. Bihar had made the largest human chain against liquor and BJP was part of it. He has to remember it," Singh said in the tweet.
Citing data in the tweet, Singh said, "The Nitish Kumar government had imposed a liquor ban on April 1, 2016. 1322 persons have lost their lives due to hooch tragedy or due to consumption of liquor in Madhya Pradesh from 2016 to 2021. On the other hand, Bihar had registered only 23 deaths during the period, which was the lowest in the country.
"Besides Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, 1013 in Karnataka, 852 in Punjab, 425 in Uttar Pradesh, 330 in Rajasthan, 487 in Jharkhand, 234 in Himachal Pradesh, 489 in Haryana, 535 in Chhattisgarh, 293 in Andhra Pradesh, 172 in Puducherry, 116 in Delhi, 54 in Gujarat, and 24 in West Bengal.
"A total of 1054 persons lost their lives due to liquor tragedy in 2016 across the country, 1510 in 2017, 1365 in 2018, 1296 in 2019 and 947 in 2020."
Earlier on Sunday, Sushil Kumar Modi targeted the Nitish Kumar government for not giving compensation to the family members of the deceased. He alleged that the current Bihar government was insensitive towards the family members of the victims. Majority of them were poor women and children who have now lost their bread earners in the hooch tragedy, said the BJP leader.
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