Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Friday said that his party was originally a movement started by Non-Resident Indians, IANS reported. Gandhi, who touring the United States, said freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were all NRIs.

“Mahatma Gandhi was a Non-Resident Indian. Jawaharlal Nehru came back from England,” Gandhi said at an event organised by the Indian National Overseas Congress in New York. “Babasaheb Ambedkar, Maulana Azad, Sardar Patel – these were all Non-Resident Indians. Every single one of them went to the outside world, saw the outside world, returned to India and used some of the ideas they got to transform India.”

The Congress scion said he views India not as a “piece of land” but as a “set of ideas”. “Some people view India as a geographical construct,” Gandhi said. “They view India as a piece of land. I don’t view India as a piece of land. I view India as a set of ideas. So for me, anybody who has the ideas that make up India is an Indian.” “Ideas take time to travel into India. But, when an idea is good, India understands it very quickly, and uses it and shows the world how it can be used,” he added.