Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, during an interaction with the Indian diaspora in London, launched a scathing attack on the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) and said that “at the heart of their ideology is cowardice”, mentioning External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s remarks on China.
Rahul said, “They have an ideology of hatred, violence, a disrespectful ideology that attacks people because of their ideas. You must have noticed one thing. This is in the nature of the BJP and the RSS. If you have noticed a statement by the foreign minister, he said China is much more powerful than us. How can I pick a fight with them? At the heart of the ideology is cowardice. Savarkar has written in his book that once he and his friends beat up a Muslim man and that day they felt great happiness. So if five people beat up a man and one person is experiencing happiness, then this is cowardice only. If you want to fight then go fight single-handedly.” “This is there in their ideology and the foreign minister in the country is saying it. You imagine him saying China is stronger than us, we don’t fight with them. The British were stronger than us, so we should not have fought with them. How would we have gotten Independence had we followed BJP and RSS principles? At the heart of their ideology is cowardice. That is the lesson for everybody,” remarked Rahul.
Stating that he had only got better, Rahul said, “The more they attack me, the better it is for me. The more I understand, the more I learn. This is the fight between courage and cowardice. It is a fight between respect and disrespect. It is a fight between love and hatred.”
Reiterating what he said during the Bharat Jodo Yatra, Rahul Gandhi mentioned that he has come to open ‘nafrat ke bazaar mein Mohabbat ki dukan’ (spread love in the atmosphere of hatred).
Highlighting his learning experience of the yatra, Rahul Gandhi said, “The interesting thing for me was what the people of India were saying. Unemployment, prices, the concentration of wealth, and Mr Adani. It is not in the media at all. In the media, we see anger, hatred, and violence. Then we see Bollywood, Aishwarya Rai, Salman Khan, and cricket, we see all these things. But we don’t see the real issues the people of India are facing.”
“We walked for almost 4,000 kms. It was a huge effort. In the first five or six days, I started to ask myself what is my role in the yatra. My role is that whoever came in the yatra, regardless of being rich, poor, young, old, male, or female, I decided my role would be to make them feel when they came to speak to us, that they had come back home. I told the people who were working with me that listen, we have to respect every single person who comes and he has to feel he has come home and when he leaves he must feel that he has left home. We do not want a political relationship with him, we want an emotional and family relationship with him,” the Congress leader added.