Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday suggested that Prime Minister Narendra Modi cannot understand why the country is not going forward as he is looking into the past.

“He [Narendra Modi] is trying to drive the car, the Indian car and he only looks in the rear-view mirror,” Gandhi said in his address to a gathering of the Indian diaspora in New York. “Then he does not understand why this car is crashing and not moving forward.”

He said that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its parent organisation Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh are incapable of looking into the future and can only talk about the past.

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Gandhi said that whenever questioned, the BJP’s immediate response to justify its actions would include an incident that occurred during the Congress regime.

The former Lok Sabha member from Kerala’s Wayanad also said that India is facing a fight between two ideologies, one represented by the Congress and the other by the BJP and the RSS.

“I think the simplest way to describe this fight is that on one side you have Mahatma Gandhi and on the other side Nathuram Godse,” Gandhi said.

In Sunday’s speech, Gandhi mentioned the train accident in Odisha’s Balasore, which killed at least 275 people and wounded 1,000 others on June 2, saying that the ministers in the Congress government used to take responsibility in cases of mishaps.

“I remember a train accident when the Congress was in power,” he said. “The Congress did not get up and say it is the fault of the British that the train has crashed. The Congress minister said that it’s my responsibility and I’m resigning. So this is a problem we have back home, we make excuses and we are not accepting the reality we are faced with.”