Congress president Rahul Gandhi has alleged that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is pursuing an agenda that amounts to “removal of the Constitution” that guarantees equal rights to all citizens. Gandhi said that the opposition would build a system of resistance that would eventually remove the BJP from power in India.
The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, in his speech at the Hertie School in Berlin, also claimed that the BJP has launched a full-scale attack and captured the country’s institutional framework to help use it as a tool to build its political power, and that is what the opposition is fighting against.
Read also | Delhi court refuses to take cognizance of National Herald money laundering case
In an hour-long video released by the Congress on Monday evening, Gandhi said India’s largest and most comprehensive democracy is a global asset and an “attack” on India’s democratic system is also an attack on the global democratic system.
“What the BJP is basically proposing is to do away with the constitution. To do away with the idea of equality between states, to do away with the idea of equality between languages and religions, to do away with the idea of the central core of the constitution, which is that every individual will be of equal value,” Gandhi told a group of students at the Hertie School last week.
In the “Politics is the Art of Listening” video, Gandhi said that when there is an attack on the democratic system, the opposition must find ways to counter it and not just say there is a problem with elections.
“We will deal with it and create a method, a system of opposition resistance that will succeed. But we are not fighting the BJP. You must understand that we are fighting their capture of India’s institutional structure,” he said.
Responding to students’ queries, Gandhi asserted that the institutional framework was being weaponized.
“We fundamentally believe that there is a problem with the electoral machinery in India. The second thing is that there is a mass hijacking of our institutional framework. There is a large-scale attack on the institutional framework of our country,” he said.
The Congress leader noted that there is an atmosphere in India where institutions are not playing the role they should play.
Gandhi said that while the Europeans were struggling to build the European Union, India built an economic and political union in 1947 that was based on a constitution.
“If you’re going to have any conversation about democracy on the planet, you can’t ignore by far the largest and most complex democracy in the world. That’s why I say Indian democracy is a global public good; it’s not just an Indian asset, it’s a global asset.”
“So when I talk about an attack on the Indian democratic system, I am not saying that, but actually it is an attack not only on the Indian democratic system, it is an attack on the global democratic system,” Gandhi remarked.
Attacking the BJP, he claimed that the Congress had clearly shown beyond a shadow of doubt that they had “won” the Haryana elections and claimed that “we don’t really feel that the Maharashtra elections were fair”.
Rahul attacks CBI, ED
Gandhi also attacked law enforcement agencies like the CBI and the ED, saying that though the Congress had helped build the institutional framework, it had never considered it as its own but that of the country.
“But the BJP doesn’t see it that way. They look at the institutional framework of India as belonging to them. So they use it as a tool to build political power,” he said.
Read also Yogi Adityanath targets Rahul, Akhilesh in UP assembly: ‘Do namune’
He alleged that the ED and the CBI were armed. “If we look at the number of cases that ED and CBI have against BJP people and against the opposition, we find that most of them are political cases,” he said.
Gandhi also attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s economic model.
If you’re going to have a conversation about democracy on the planet, you can’t ignore by far the largest and most complex democracy in the world.
PM Modi, BJP and RSS basically took Manmohan Singh’s economic models and pushed them straight forward, he claimed. “What Mr. Modi is trying to do economically cannot go any further… it is stuck,” he claimed.
Rahul meets ‘anti-India forces in Germany’: BJP
Rahul Gandhi was in Germany last week. The BJP claimed this on Saturday Rahul Gandhi met “enemies of India” during his visit to Germany and demanded transparency in the Leader of the Opposition’s dealings with “global actors abroad”.
At a press conference at the BJP headquarters here, party spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia showed a purported picture of Gandhi with the president and professor of the Berlin Hertie School. Cornelia Woll and called it “proof” of the Congress leader’s meeting with “anti-Indian forces in Germany”.
Bhatia claimed that Woll is one of the trustees of the Central European University, which is funded by American billionaire investor George Soros. Open Society Foundation.
