Washington:Congress leader and leader of the opposition in Lok Sabha Raul GandhiOn Tuesday, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) came under attack from the education establishment, media and investigative agencies, who blocked Congress bank accounts ahead of an “unfair” Lok Sabha election. It also claimed that it did not hate Prime Minister Narendra Modi and that they simply had a difference of perspective.
At a meeting with students at the prestigious Georgetown University, Rahul Gandhi said, “Before the elections, we were emphasising that institutions were being captured – the education system was captured by the RSS, the media was captured and the investigative agencies were captured. But people didn’t understand it and we couldn’t understand why. At a meeting, someone who works with us said, ‘Try upholding the Constitution.’ I started upholding the Constitution and suddenly everything we had been saying exploded.
“India realised in this election that it should not be so crudely divided, but poor, marginalised and oppressed India realised that if the Constitution is compromised, the whole system collapses. That was the shocking realisation I witnessed. Poor people deeply understood that it is now a battle between those who protect the Constitution and those who seek to destroy it,” he added.
The BJP could not have won 240 seats in a “fair election”
The Congress leader stressed that the recent Lok Sabha elections were far from being “free and fair” otherwise the BJP would not have been able to win 240 seats. “I don’t think that in a fair election, the BJP would come close to 240 seats. I would be surprised. They had a huge financial advantage and had blocked our bank accounts. The Election Commission was doing whatever it wanted. The entire campaign was structured so that Mr Modi could carry out his agenda across the country, with different designs for different states. I don’t see it as a free election,” he added.
“I was watching the elections and there came a time when we sat down with the treasurer, who said, ‘Look, your bank accounts are frozen. How are you supposed to fight an election if your bank accounts are frozen?’ At that time we didn’t really have an answer. But the Congress party fought the election and basically destroyed Modi’s idea,” Rahul Gandhi continued.
He expressed confidence that the Congress will emerge victorious in the upcoming elections against the BJP. “In the next two to three months we will win these elections… Repairing the damage that the BJP and the RSS have done to our institutions is a much deeper problem and it is not going to be solved so easily or so simply… There is a huge set of structures that are being used to attack the opposition – investigative agencies, the legal system which is still in place and it has to be stopped. The real challenge is to make the institutions neutral again,” he said.
Don’t hate Narendra Modi: Rahul Gandhi
He further alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was “psychologically trapped” and could not understand the results of the Lok Sabha elections in which the BJP failed to secure a majority by winning 240 seats while the Congress got 99. He repeated his oft-repeated claims that PM Modi had a “nexus” with two or three big corporates.
“Midway through the campaign, Modi did not believe he was anywhere near 300 or 400 seats… We knew that when he said I was speaking directly to God, we had shattered him… We saw it as a psychological breakdown… The coalition that brought Narendra Modi to power has collapsed,” Rahul Gandhi said at Georgetown University.
However, Rahul Gandhi said he did not “hate” PM Modi. “When Indians go to their religious places, they merge with their deity. That is the nature of India. The misunderstanding that the BJP and the RSS have is that they think India is a lot of separate things… He has a point of view; I don’t agree with him, but I don’t hate him. He has a different perspective, and I have a different perspective… At many points I empathise with him,” he said.
‘The reservation will be cancelled if…’
Rahul Gandhi also said that the Congress will think about removing reservations when India is a fair place, which is not the case at the moment. “If you look at the financial figures, tribals get 10 paise for every Rs 100, Dalits get Rs 5 for every Rs 100 and OBCs get a similar figure. The fact is that they are not getting any share,” he said.
“The problem is that 90 per cent of India cannot participate. Go through the list of all the business leaders in India. I have done it. Show me the name of the tribe. Show me the name of the Dalit. Show me the name of the OBC. Out of the top 200, I think there is one OBC. They are 50 per cent of India. But we are not treating the symptom,” he said on his stance on the caste census.
(with contributions from agencies)
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