NEW DELHI: On a day BJP president Amit Shah announced that the Janata Dal United and BJP will contest an equal number of seats in Bihar, JD(U) leader Pawan Varma said his party “will remain in the NDA and ensure that India never becomes a Hindu Rashtra”.Speaking at the release of Shashi Tharoor ’s new book ‘The Paradoxical Prime Minister’, Varma also said he believes that the idea of a “composite, plural, united India” is fundamental to the country and that JD(U) will always fight for it.“If Mr Modi is an obstacle to it as some people believe he is, we will fight him,” Varma said. The former diplomat, however, also said he has a problem with ‘black and white’ binaries and pointed out that while ‘not everything that happened in the country before 2014 was wrong, and not everything that happened after 2014 was right’, the opposition is in a state of disarray and that it had failed to identify a leader strong or credible enough to challenge PM Modi.Releasing the book, former PM Manmohan Singh also took down the “Paradoxical PM” and said the “Modi rule” had eroded the promises made to the electorate, failed the people of India and is “not good” for the country.He said the CBI had been “vitiated”. He also accused the government of remaining silent on mob violence and lynchings. He said, “A fearful population, an economy that has been setback by foolhardy initiatives, a painful lack of jobs, growing distrust among india’s farming communities, a devastating number of farmer suicides, insecure borders, instability in Kashmir and the palpable failure in implementation of even laudable initiatives like Swachh Bharat, skill development, Make in India and Beti Bachao Beti Pathao; this is what the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi presides over, not secular, plural, free and equal society that our founding fathers had envisaged and envisioned and was built in the first six and a half decades as a free nation.”Tharoor, who said he gave Modi the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of his tenue, has now, in his book, given “an analysis, a profile and an unsparing account of the paradoxes of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister”.