Rahul Gandhi’s Cambridge speech: ‘Modi blowing my country to smithereens’

Rahul Gandhi’s speech at Cambridge University earlier this week has not gone down well with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Gandhi delivered the lecture ‘Learning to Listen in the 21st Century’ at the Cambridge Judge Business School (Cambridge JBS) on Tuesday evening as a Visiting Fellow.

A part of his lecture focused on the "two divergent perspectives” of the US and China since World War II, and the final strand was around the "Imperative for a Global Conversation".

During his lecture, Gandhi spoke about the ‘threat to democracy’ in India and its institutions and the attack on the press.

He spoke about how the minorities in the country were targeted, protests stifled and how politicians including him, were under surveillance.

‘What is happening is that the institutional framework which is required for a democracy — Parliament, a free press, the judiciary, just the idea of mobilisation, just the idea of moving around … these are all getting constrained. So, we are facing an attack on the basic structure of Indian democracy’, Gandhi said.

BJP slammed the Congress leader for his lecture saying that he insulted India and praised China.

‘This is Rahul Gandhi- whenever he goes abroad, he insults India...He does this whenever he goes abroad and calls China the symbol of goodwill. Country should see his true face...We condemn his childish statement,’ BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

‘First foreign agents target us! Then our own targets us on a foreign land! Rahul Gandhi’s speech at Cambridge was nothing but a brazen attempt to denigrate our country on foreign soil in the guise of targeting PM Modi’, Assam Chief Minister and BJP leader Himanta Biswa Sarma said.

‘Instead of introspecting on loss of 172 seats out of 180 in N East polls, loss of 50+ elections out of 54 under his command, Rahul Gandhi is busy crying wolf on foreign shores! RG Cambridge speech is Classic Case of ‘Naach Na Jaane, Aangan Tedaa’ or ‘Bad Workman blames his tools’, BJP national spokesperson Jaiveer Shergill tweeted.

During his lecture, Gandhi spoke about how the conversation and negotiation much needed between the multiple states in the country to move forward was under threat.

Showing a photograph of the police stopping him and several other party MPs at Vijay Chowk during a protest against Sonia Gandhi’s questioning by the Enforcement Directorate last July, he said that they were locked up in jail, ‘relatively violently’.

Gandhi also spoke about the ‘capture and control of media and judiciary’. He revealed that he had Pegasus on his phone, just like many other politicians; and that he was warned by Intelligence officers to be cautious while speaking on the phone as the conversations were being recorded.

During his journey as part of Bharat Jodo Yatra, through Kashmir, he recalled security personnel approaching and trying to dissuade him from walking through the state as hand grenades would be thrown at him. However, as they decided to continue walking, Indian flags started to come out everywhere and around 40, 000 people showed up instead of 2, 000 as they were told initially.

He spoke about how he was deeply moved by the ‘emotional outbursts’ of people sharing their personal experiences, mentioning how two girls, victims of gang rape, grabbed his hands on either side and shared their story of pain with him.

Gandhi also described with experience of coming face to face with militants in Kashmir. But nothing happened, he said. ‘They actually didn’t have the power to do anything even if they wanted to. Because I had come into that environment listening. And I had come into that environment completely with no violence in me at all’, he added.

Despite a few good policies he introduced such as ‘giving ladies gas cylinders and giving people bank accounts’, in my view, Narendra Modi is destroying the architecture of India, said Gandhi. ‘So, I am not bothered about two or three good policies that he is doing if he is blowing my country to smithereens or our country to smithereens’, he said.

‘He is imposing an idea on India that India cannot absorb. India, as I said, is a union of states. It is a negotiation and if you try to force one idea on a union, it will react’, he added.