Rahul Gandhi speaks at University of California, Berkeley on Tuesday. (Source: Twitter/@INCIndia)
Over three years after his party was routed in the Lok Sabha elections, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday admitted that a certain amount of arrogance had crept into the party midway during UPA II which broke the culture of conversation. He said the vision that the party had laid out in 2004 too was designed at best for a decade.
“Any party which is in power in India for ten years will run into a problem. It is natural…The vision that we had laid out in 2004 was designed at best for a ten year period. And it was pretty clear that the vision that we had laid out in 2004. By the time we arrived in 2010-11 it was already not working anymore,” Gandhi said during a question-answer session after addressing the students of the University of California.
He said unlike the BJP and the RSS, the Congress is a “conversation”.
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“So the way we design policies, a vision is not by standing up there and saying listen this is what I think I am going to tell you or I am going to do. We design a vision by having a conversation. But somewhere around 2012, and I will say this, a certain arrogance crept into the Congress party and they stopped having that conversation.”
Gandhi said rebuilding the Congress requires designing a vision that India can use going forward. He said the BJP government has borrowed the central architecture from the UPA, be it NREGA or the GST. “But that architecture doesn’t work. We know it because it has stopped working.”
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On the future of the Congress, he said, “One is to make a transition and a smooth one between the sort of senior people and younger people. You can’t just brush aside all seniors. So you have to bring people together, you have to put some new faces, you have to put some old faces…that is the compromise. That is one aspect.
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“But the main thing is that India has unleashed 400-500 million people. It is not good enough for us to say that we are not going to give them a vision. It can’t be done. Because if you don’t give them a vision, then you enter a very dangerous space. And really what has happened is that if you look at India from about 2012 — and we are to blame for at least two to three years of that — India has basically lost its vision,” he said.
