AICC plenary: Rahul Gandhi says he wants to break 'walls' within Congress

Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Sunday sought to shape the contours of his party’s election campaign for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls as the battle of Mahabharata between the Kauravas of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who are well organised with immense resources but are arrogant, who indulge in falsehood and are drunk on power, against the Pandavas of the Congress, who are humble, speak softly and are fighting for truth. Rahul Gandhi’s presidential speech at the 84th plenary session of the Congress party, where he called for reform in the party, was reminiscent of his father Rajiv Gandhi’s speech at the centenary session of the Congress party on December 28, 1985, in Mumbai. Then, Rajiv Gandhi had spoken of the enthusiasm of ordinary Congress workers being “handicapped” by the “brokers of power and influence” in the party, who “dispense patronage to convert a mass movement into a feudal oligarchy”. In his speech, Rahul Gandhi said his first task would be to demolish the “wall” between leaders and workers, where party tickets are denied to hardworking workers by people who “parachute” at the last moment, or when a worker, who has spent 10 to 15 years for the party, is told he cannot get the ticket since has no money to contest election. In what was his first address to the party as its chief, Rahul Gandhi said he wanted to carve out space for workers, and for all talented young women and men in the Congress, but this process would be carried out “not with anger, but with love” and by giving “due respect to the senior leadership”. However, Rahul Gandhi also appealed to party leaders to avoid infighting, at least until the Lok Sabha polls. “Fight (among yourselves), but after the elections. Please,” he said. The Congress chief criticised the Narendra Modi government for its “links” with crony capitalists. He said the cases of jeweller Nirav Modi and former cricket tsar Lalit Modi have shown how the name ‘Modi’ has come to symbolize the links of crony capitalist with the PM. He alleged that Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is “silent” at the bank fraud case since his lawyer daughter “works for crony capitalists”. Rahul Gandhi identified joblessness among youth, farm distress and farmer suicides as the problems facing the country, and sketched his vision of a Congress-led government at the Centre creating food parks that would ensure suitable price to farmers for their produce, farm loan waiver and interest-free loans to farmers. He said he envisioned encouraging small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with banking loans and technological help for job generation. Rahul Gandhi conceded that people of the country had felt let down by the Congress in the last few years of the UPA-2 government. But the question now was whether India wishes to live the lies of “Modi’s maya”, or have the courage to face the truth of joblessness and farm distress. The Congress chief said the world currently has two visions – the American vision, and the Chinese vision. But he wished to see the world in the next 10-year talk about the middle path of the Indian vision, which is a vision of “brotherhood, non-violence and love”. Critiquing the BJP-RSS, he said the two organisations were only interested in power grab.

In a reference to BJP chief Amit Shah, he said the BJP has accepted a man accused of murder to be the BJP chief. He said the Congress would never accept such a person as its chief, and India will never let the Congress “lie or hate” like BJP and RSS. He said the crucial difference was between the two parties was that the “BJP was the voice of an organisation (RSS), but the Congress is the voice of a nation.” Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh speaks during the second day of the 84th Plenary Session of Indian National Congress (INC), at the Indira Gandhi stadium in New Delhi on Sunday Rahul Gandhi said when Mahatma Gandhi, as the leader of the Congress, lay on a floor in a British jail, their (Sangh Parivar) leader VD Savarkar was “begging the British for mercy”. Rahul Gandhi said the Congress ideology was on its way to win the next General Elections, and the PM read the tea leaves in Gujarat, and his face shows that he is nervous. In his speech, former prime minister Manmohan Singh said the Modi government "messed up" the economy, and was spouting "jumla" (rhetoric) with pipe dreams about generating 20 million jobs and doubling farm incomes. He also accused the BJP-led government of having "mismanaged" the dispute in Jammu and Kashmir and said the government's talk of fighting two and a half wars was “yet another hollow promise”. Singh said that only about 1.6% of the country's GDP was spent on defence expenditure, which, he said, could not meet the challenges that the security apparatus posed. He also faulted the Modi government’s foreign policy. On the economy, which he said grew by 7.8% under the UPA regime led by him, Singh rued that at a time the world economy had grown from 2.8% to 3.8% from 2014 to 2018, the Indian economy had "decoupled itself" from the world economy. Both Rahul Gandhi and he criticised demonetisation and GST implementation. On the promise of doubling farmers’ income, the former PM said: “If you have to double farmers' incomes in six years' time, you need a growth rate of 12% per annum as the minimum. And that is unthinkable” and termed it as another “jumla-type statement”.