Congress leader Rahul Gandhi addresses the Indian diaspora during an event at Hounslow. (PTI)
NAOMI CANTON / TNN / Updated: Mar 7, 2023, 04:03 IST
HOUNSLOW: Rahul Gandhi said at the diaspora event “London Greets RG” here on Sunday that the reason he spoke about the problems in India overseas was because he was not allowed to speak in India.
Rahul, who was addressing between 1,500 and 2,000 Congress supporters in a packed banquet hall at a Hounslow hotel, said that whilst giving a talk on politics at Cambridge University, he thought to himself “that it is quite strange that an Indian political leader can give a talk in Cambridge or Harvard university but cannot give a talk at a university in India”.
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BJP, meanwhile, asked Rahul not to “betray India” with comments in the UK. “Don’t betray India, Rahul Gandhi ji. The objections to India’s foreign policy is an evidence of your scant understanding… No one will believe lies you spread from foreign soil,” Union minister Anurag Thakur said.
Late Monday evening (India time), Rahul told British MPs at an event organised by Labour MP Virendra Sharma within the House of Commons complex that microphones in the Lok Sabha are often silenced. “Our mikes are functioning…but you can’t switch them on. It’s happened to me a number of times while speaking.”
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“The reason is our government simply does not allow any idea of the opposition to be discussed. The same happens in Parliament House. We want to raise important things like demonetization, GST, the fact the Chinese are sitting inside our territory. When we try to raise these questions, we are not allowed to. It is shameful, but true. This is not the India all of us are used to. Our country is an open country, where we respect each other’s opinions, and that atmosphere has been destroyed,” he said.
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The Indian Overseas Congress (IOC) UK event was oversubscribed, and some people who had registered had to be turned away. When Rahul arrived, three hours after the start time, there were huge cheers and people swarmed around the stage to photograph him, shouting “Rahul Gandhi Zindabad”. A whole string of people, including Sam Pitroda, made speeches before he did. Rahul’s speech in English, with bits in Hindi, ended up being only 15 minutes long.
“I believe some people were not able to come because the hall was full and I was asking, ‘Where do weddings happen over here’,” he said as he began his speech.
Rahul explained he was “forced” to walk the Bharat Jodo Yatra as all the Indian institutions that protect freedom of speech and democracy had been captured by BJP, so the best option was to go directly to the people of India. What he learnt from listening to people was that the big issues facing the country are unemployment, price rise, the violence that Indian women face and the concentration of wealth. “This is at the expense of the Indian people because when there is no competition in a country, and one person is making all the money because of his political connections, the strength and energy of the country is wasted,” he explained. “The interesting thing to me was that what the people of India were talking about is not in the media at all. We see anger, hatred, violence, Bollywood, Aishwarya Rai, cricket, but we don’t see the real issue the people of India are facing.”
The 4,000-km yatra, which stretched over 150 days, attracted at any one time 50,000 to 100,000 people of all religions, castes and languages, he said. “It demonstrated to the whole country what the real India is about, what Indian values are, what our religions tell us, what our languages and cultures tell us — we are one country with many different ideas and we have the capability of living together harmoniously without hatred, anger and disrespect, and it is when we do that that we are successful,” Rahul said.
“On the other side we have an ideology of hatred and violence, a disrespectful ideology that attacks people because of their ideas, and this is the nature of BJP and RSS,” Rahul said.
Rahul then attacked S Jaishankar for his recent comments in which he had said that China is much more powerful than India so how can India pick a fight with China. “At the heart of the ideology is cowardice,” Rahul said. “The foreign minister is saying China is stronger than us so we can’t fight with them. The British were stronger than us, so we shouldn’t have fought with them? How would we ever have got independence if we had followed the BJP and RSS principle that if you are stronger than us, then we don’t fight? We would still be ruled by the British. This is a fight between courage and cowardice, a fight between respect and disrespect, between love and hatred,” he said to huge applause. He praised the Indian diaspora for being a shining example of what it means to be Indian by respecting England and living peacefully whilst also sharing their traditions and culture.