After Congress leader alleges Opposition leaders, including him, are under surveillance and democracy is under attack, BJP accuses him of “crying wolf on foreign shores”
Rahul Gandhi’s speech at Cambridge University earlier this week drew the BJP’s ire as it was learnt that the Congress leader spoke of the “threat to democracy” in India and alleged that several politicians, including him, were under surveillance.
Gandhi made the remarks during a lecture at the Cambridge Judge Business School (Cambridge JBS) on “Learning to Listen in the 21st Century”. BJP national spokesperson Jaiveer Shergill tweeted, “Instead of introspecting on loss of 172 seats out of 180 in N East polls, loss of 50+ elections out of 54 under his command, Rahul Gandhi is busy crying wolf on foreign shores! RG Cambridge speech is Classic Case of ‘Naach Na Jaane, Aangan Tedaa’ or ‘Bad Workman blames his tools’.”
Here are the 10 things that Gandhi spoke of:
On democracy in India
“Indian democracy is under pressure, is under attack. I am an Opposition leader in India and we are navigating that space. What is happening is that the institutional framework which is required for a democracy — Parliament, a free press, the judiciary — just the idea of mobilisation, just the idea of moving around … these are all getting constrained. So, we are facing an attack on the basic structure of Indian democracy.”
On federalism
“In the Constitution, India is described as a union of states and that union requires a negotiation, requires a conversation. It is slightly different than other countries. You can think about it much more at the scale of Europe. Multiple different states, much much bigger, requiring a conversation and a negotiation to actually move forward. It is that negotiation that is actually coming under and is under threat.”
Protests stifled
Showing a photograph of the police stopping him and several other party MPs at Vijay Chowk during a protest against Sonia Gandhi’s questioning by the Enforcement Directorate last July, he said, “That picture is taken in front of Parliament House. That is where a whole bunch of Opposition members of Parliament were just standing there talking about certain issues and we were just locked up and put in jail. And that has happened three or four times. And it has happened relatively violently.”
Attack on minorities
“You have also heard of the attack on minorities, the attack on the press. So, you get a sense of what is going on. The one way I would like to think about it is that in India democracy is a public good because it is by far the biggest democracy … so preserving Indian democracy is more than just about India. It is actually about the democratic structure and democratic system on the planet.”
Surveillance and attack on institutions
“Capture and control of media and judiciary. Surveillance and intimidation. I myself had Pegasus on my phone. A large number of politicians have Pegasus on their phones. I have been called by Intelligence officers who tell me, ‘Listen, please be careful of what you are saying on the phone because we are sort of recording the stuff.’ This is constant, constant pressure that we feel. Cases of opposition … I have got a number of criminal libel cases for things that should under no circumstances be criminal libel cases. So. that is the story. And that is what we are trying to defend. What we found as the Opposition is that it is very difficult to communicate with people when you have this type of assault on the media, on the democratic architecture.”
Bharat Jodo Yatra experience
“We started getting people who started talking to us about things that we never imagined that they would speak about … Suddenly, we were getting these emotional outbursts of people telling us the most personal things. So, I am walking and suddenly these two girls come, one of them grabs my hand on this side and the other one grabs my hand on the other side. When they grabbed my hand I felt something I have never felt before … I thought this is strange, the way they are holding my hand, there is something strange in it. It is almost like a desperate way of holding my hand. I looked at the girl and said tell me what’s happened, how you are doing? And she looks at me and she says well my sister and me were gang-raped by five guys. This is not a personal conversation that you will have with somebody who you have just met. I said let’s call the cops. That was my first reaction. I am like that’s a real problem, let’s call the cops.
“They were like, ‘Please, don’t call the cops, you can’t call the cops’ … And they are like, ‘If you call the cops we will be shamed.’ And then the girl says, ‘I will never be able to get married.’ So I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ I said If I don’t call the cops how do I help you. They said, ‘No, we just wanted our brother to know what had happened to us.’ And I said, ‘You have told your brother what has happened to you, now what do I do?’ They said there is nothing you can do and they just walked away. You extrapolate that and then you can see thousands of women who have faced something like that and you can see the pain that is there, hidden, and you can see the difficulty that they are dealing with. I thought, these girls have dealt with this and now they are going to deal with it for the rest of their lives and they are never going to tell anybody. I thought that was crazy.”