Congress president Rahul Gandhi spoke about joblessness, lynchings and hugs while addressing a gathering at the Kampnagel Theater, Bucerius Summer School in Hamburg, Germany.
The Congress leader said, there is a big job problem in India but the prime minister refuses to see it. He 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.
ALSO READ: Pak Army Chief talked about peace, was an emotional moment for…
Gandhi traced 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.
After the US attacked Iraq in 2003, Rahul Gandhi said, they brought a law that stopped a particular tribe in Iraq from getting jobs in the government and in the army. “It seemed like a very innocuous decision at that time. But it resulted in a large number of people joining insurgency that fought the US and caused massive casualties,” he said.
“It didn’t end there. That insurgence slowly entered empty spaces. It entered the empty space in Iraq and in Syria and then it connected with…a horrific idea called ISIS,” Gandhi said.
“And that’s the real risk of excluding large number of people from our development processes,” he said, accusing the BJP government of excluding tribals, Dalits and minorities from the development process.
He also said that demonetisation and GST, hit the informal economy causing anger which is leading to lynching incidents.
He alleged that a 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.
“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,” he said.
On his hugging PM Modi in the parliament during the no-confidence motion, Gandhi said that some of his own party members did not like it when he hugged PM Modi in Parliament.
Talking about his father’s, former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s, assailants he said “when I saw the man who killed my father lying dead in a field in Sri Lanka, I did not like it, I saw his crying children in him,” he said.
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) Velupillai Prabhakaran, who was behind the killing of Rajiv Gandhi, was shot dead by Sri Lankan troops in 2009.