Rahul also slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing him of sending the wrong message to China by denying the Chinese had taken over 2,000 sq km of Indian territory.
‘Fight is between two old ideas of India…’:Rahul Gandhi tears into BJP in the UK
“The democratic contest in India used to be between political parties. Now the nature of the democratic contest in India has completely changed because one organisation, called the RSS, a fundamentalist fascist organisation, has basically captured pretty much all of India’s institutions,” Rahul said. “You can call the RSS a secret society. It is built along the lines of the Muslim Brotherhood and the idea is to use the democratic contest to come to power and then subvert the democratic contest afterwards,” he said.
Rahul’s equating the Muslim Brotherhood with BJP goes as far back as August 2018 when a similar comparison had led BJP to accuse him of being a “contract killer” of the idea called India.
“The Prime Minister one day turns round and demonetises the entire currency and the RBI doesn’t know about it. Everything has been bypassed. It is the same way the GST was worked out, so you can see the reliance on those institutions is reduced, and that, to me, is very dangerous. What is the one big thing BJP has done? It is huge concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s Office and huge concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people, and, to me, a country the size of India cannot be run like that.” Instead, Rahul said, there should be decentralisation, support for SMEs, and a re-imagination of India’s manufacturing industry using technology, and for that linkages between the West and India are critical.
There is a hint of jealousy as unlike Rahul Gandhi PM was not invited to Cambridge University: Supriya Shrinate
“There are articles in the foreign press all the time that there is a serious problem with Indian democracy. You can ask any opposition leader about how the agencies are used. My phone had Pegasus on it,” he added. “That was not happening when we were in power.”
He made it clear this was an “internal Indian problem and the solution will come from inside, not from outside”, but said India’s democracy is a “public good” and “if Indian democracy collapses, democracy on the planet suffers a possibly fatal blow”.
RSS a “fundamentalist”, “fascist” organisation, captured all of India’s institutions: Rahul Gandhi
“Before BJP were in power for 10 years, we were in power for 10 years. BJP likes to believe they have come to power and will be in power eternally. That is not the case. To say that now BJP is in power and Congress is gone, that is a ridiculous idea,” he said, blaming the former UPA regime on initially being too focused on the rural space and “missing the ball on the urban space” as India transitions away from the rural economy. “The resistance in India is also very strong and powerful and can do wonders,” he said.
He said the real problem in India was unemployment, which was generating a lot of fear. He said earlier India and Western countries “produced things”, but now that has been “parcelled out to China”. “I don’t believe that a country like India can employ all its people with services. It just doesn’t have the connectivity or structure. The question is can the democratic production model be rebuilt,” he said.
Rahul Gandhi compares Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh borders to that of Ukraine
Referring to the Chinese, he said: “They are sitting on 2,000 km of our territory, and when they did it, our Prime Minister said, in a meeting with the opposition, that not a single inch of Indian territory has been taken. What message does that send to the Chinese?”
He said in the same way Russia does not want Ukraine to have relationships with the West and is threatening Ukraine’s territory, in his view “China doesn’t want us to have a relationship with the US, and it is threatening us, and that is why their troops are in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh”.He said he had mentioned this to EAM S. Jaishankar, who had branded his idea as “ludicrous”.
BJP is not going to be in power eternally: Rahul Gandhi slams Centre in the UK