Panaji: Union Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Saturday said India did not seek war, but would “gouge out eyes” of the enemy if provoked.
“We don’t itch for a fight, but if someone looks at the country with evil eye, we will gouge his eyes out and put them back in his hand, we have that much power,” he said while addressing a rally in Aldona Assembly constituency in Goa.
Goans can tell the world that they had sent a man to the Centre who had slapped the enemy across the face, he said.
“There was no firing on the border for the last three days because if they (Pakistan) fire once, we fire twice at them. We are giving tit-for-tat response, and when they realised it, they approached us, seeking to stop it,” Parrikar said in an apparent referrence to the request by Pakistan for DGMO-level talks three days ago.
Asserting that, Armed Forces were fully prepared, Parrikar said his mother had taught him that “even if you are going to hunt a rabbit, be prepared to kill a tiger”.
The former Goa Chief Minister also recalled words of wisdom from his mother, which he said he recalls often, especially when dealing with Pakistan.
“If you go to hunt hares in a forest be prepared to fight a tiger, my mother used to tell me. I have not forgotten what she told me when I was a child… Our country’s border is safe, the country’s economic backbone is secure. This, people have realised after demonetisation,” Parrikar said.
Parrikar also said that in India’s commercial capital Mumbai, supari (underworld slang for contract killing), extortion has stopped and the crime graph has dipped after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetisation decision.