Picture : Twitter
Congress president Rahul Gandhi on a visit to Germany has once again from foreign shores lashed out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government.
Addressing a gathering at the Bucerius Summer School in Hamburg, Gandhi has claimed that 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.
I began my 2 day visit to Germany with a speech at the Bucerius Summer School in Hamburg, yesterday. Today, I am in Berlin to meet members of the German Bundestag, NGO’s & Business Leaders. I will also be addressing a public meeting organised by the Indian Overseas Congress. pic.twitter.com/11omr91GI3
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) August 23, 2018
Gandhi traced the creation of ISIS to warn against a similar situation at home if people are excluded from the development 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”.
“And that’s the real risk of excluding large number of people from our development processes”, he said accusing the BJP government of excluding the tribals, dalits, minorities in the development process.
“They (the BJP government) feel tribal communities, poor farmers, lower caste people, minorities shouldn’t get the same benefits as the elite. The other thing they’ve done is they’ve started attacking the support structures created to help certain groups of people. That’s not the only damage they’ve done,” he said.
Mr. Gandhi said there is “something much more dangerous” that has happened, and that is — a couple of years ago the prime minister “demonetized the Indian economy and destroyed cash flows to small and medium businesses, rendering millions jobless”.
The Congress president addressed the gathering for more than an hour. He also took questions from students from across the world.
Gandhi said that after the US attacked Iraq in 2003, 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,” he said.
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,” Mr. Gandhi said.
He said there is a lot of hatred in the world but not enough people are listening. The only solution, he added, was to understand people.
