Hamburg | Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday while speaking at the at the Bucerius Summer School in Germany’s Hamburg claimed that the incidents of lynching in India were due to ‘anger’ emanating from joblessness and ‘destruction’ of small businesses due to demonetisation and the ‘poorly implemented’ GST by the ruling BJP.
Speaking about the current situation in India, Rahul Gandhi gave an example about the creation of ISIS to warn against a similar situation at home if people are excluded from the development process.”It is very dangerous in the 21st century to exclude people. If you don’t give people a vision in the 21st century somebody else will give them one,” said Gandhi
He further criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi government for excluding tribals, Dalits and minorities from the development process. He alleged that “They (the BJP government) feel that tribal communities, poor farmers, lower caste people, minorities shouldn’t get the same benefits as the elite.”
Taking a dig at the implementation of economic policies by the BJP government, Gandhi said, “Couple of years back Prime Minister Narendra Modi ‘demonetised the Indian economy and destroyed the cash flow’ of all small and medium businesses rendering millions jobless”. They imposed a badly conceptualised GST which complicated lives further,” he added. He further claimed, “Large numbers of people who worked in small businesses were forced back to the villages and these three things that the government has done has made India angry. And that’s what you get to read in the newspapers. When you hear about lynchings when you hear about attacks on Dalits in India when you hear about attacks on minorities in India, that’s the reason for it,” said Gandhi while comparing the increasing events of Mob lynching with rise in unemployment back in India.
Alleging the current government of sidelining the welfare schemes of UPA government, Gandhi said, “Welfare measures of the previous UPA government — such as the right to food and the right to guaranteed employment — had been weakened and the money going into these schemes is going into the hands of very few people, the largest corporates in the country”.
He also spoke about his infamous hug to PM Modi during the No confidence motion in Lok Sabha. “Some people in his party didn’t like his act of hugging the PM and quipped that now Opposition leaders are sceptical about him. The basic idea is that if someone hates you, responding their hate with hate is foolish as it won’t solve any problem,” said Gandhi.
Gandhi further said that he and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra were not happy after his father’s (Rajiv Gandhi) killer, LTTE chief Prabhakaran was killed. “My grandmother (Indira Gandhi) and my father (Rajiv Gandhi) were both killed. So, I have suffered violence. I am talking actually from experience. The only way you can move forward after violence is forgiveness. There is no other way. And to forgive you have to understand what exactly happened and why it happened,” added Gandhi.
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