New Delhi: Bizzare logic, a sense of humour, thinking on his feet or pure PR spin. Take your pick to explain Narendra Modi’s latest controversy kindling statement where the Gujarat CM has attributed his state’s high malnutrition rates to vegetarianism and the beauty conscious middle class.

The story starts with an interview that Modi gave to The Wall Street Journal, an American news daily. The reporter, quoting government data, asked Modi a question that “about half of Gujarati children under five were stunted, or too short for their age.”

In response, Narendra Modi told the WSJ that Gujarat is mostly a vegetarian state and that creates a challenge. Modi followed it up by saying, “Gujarat is also a middle-class state. The middle-class is more beauty conscious than health conscious.”

“If a mother tells her daughter to have milk, they’ll have a fight. She’ll tell her mother, “I won’t drink milk. I’ll get fat.”

What is peculiar is that the question was focused on children under the age of 5, hardly an age group which is ‘figure conscious’.

Modi did, however, add “I can’t make any big claims, because I don’t have a survey in front of me yet.”

Suprisingly, despite being one of the country’s industrial states with a high per capita income, Gujarat ranks very low on health and nutrition.

According to the National Family Health Survey, over 41 percent of Gujarat’s children under three years of age are underweight while over 55 percent of Gujarati women in the 15-45 age group are anaemic.