Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Friday said the Narendra Modi government is at war with people and accused it of imposing a “single, suffocating ideology on 1.3 billion people”, the Hindustan Times reported. He was speaking at a leadership summit organised by the newspaper.
The Congress leader did not raise specific allegations but criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party for the way it has handled the economy. “The economy is decimated, the rupee is on its knees... the informal system is decimated, public confidence is in tatters,” he said. “This is the price of hatred... Aspiration of people has been turned into hatred.”
Gandhi claimed the media is also under attack. “Our friends in the media are sacked when they criticise the prime minister,” the Congress president said. “Gauri Lankesh is shot dead because of what she wrote. Fresh thinking is unwelcome. In fact, forget about fresh thinking, they hate thinkers: Raghuram Rajan, Amartya Sen, the list goes on.”
The Congress leader alleged that institutions were being destroyed. “Supreme Court judges are compelled to go public because they feel intimidated,” Gandhi claimed. “In the same breath that they spoke of their fears, they spoke of Judge Loya. The sole qualification of vice chancellor after vice chancellor chosen to lead India’s top universities is that they belong to the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh].”
Gandhi said the BJP can only coin slogans. “And while India burns, all they do is talk about their slogans, But their slogans have a shelf life: Make in India. Start up India. Clean India. What exactly have they translated into? Nothing.”
He said India was a “partnership between all its peoples” and claimed that his party does not believe in binaries. “Everyone in India is a stakeholder – all of us, rich or poor, weak or strong, north or south, east or west every voice is a part of the harmony that makes India,” he said. “We do not subscribe to black or white ideologies.”
Reacting to Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati’s decision to not ally with the Congress for the upcoming Assembly elections in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, Gandhi said it would not affect his party much in Madhya Pradesh. “The alliance in state and the alliance in the Centre are very different...,” PTI quoted the Congress president as saying. “Mayawati ji has indicated that. We were pretty flexible in the state, in fact I was more flexible than some of our state leaders. We were in the midst of the conversation but I guess they decided to go their own way.”
He suggested that the two parties may tie up for the Lok Sabha elections next year. “I think in national elections parties will come together particularly in Uttar Pradesh,” Gandhi added.
The Congress president has been on the offensive against the BJP-led government in the past few months regarding alleged irregularities in the Rafale defence deal with France. His latest remarks came days after the party’s working committee called for a “second freedom struggle” against the Centre to combat the ideology of “hate and violence”.
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