There’s Nothing ‘Hindu’ About What BJP Does: Rahul Gandhi

At an interaction with students and academics in Paris, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi hit out at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), saying that there is “nothing Hindu” about its actions and that the ruling party is out to get power at any cost.

During an interaction at the Sciences PO University in Paris on Saturday, the 53-year-old opposition leader covered a broad range of topics such as his Bharat Jodo Yatra, the opposition alliance’s fight to defend India’s democratic structures, changing global order and other major issues. The Sciences PO University in Paris is a leading social sciences institution in France.

Gandhi asserted that the country would “come out just fine” from the current “turbulence” and that the opposition was committed to fighting for the “soul of India”.

In response to a question about the rise of “Hindu nationalism” in India at the interaction, a video of which was released on Sunday, Gandhi said, “I’ve read the Gita’, I’ve read a number of the Upanishads, I’ve read many Hindu books; there is nothing Hindu about what the BJP does, absolutely nothing.”

He added, “I have not read anywhere, in no Hindu book, from no learned Hindu person have I ever heard that you should terrorise, harm people who are weaker than you. So, this idea, this word, ‘Hindu nationalists’, this is a wrong word. They’re not Hindu nationalists. They have nothing to do with Hinduism. They are out to get power at any cost, and they will do anything to get power. They want dominance of a few people and that is what they are about. There is nothing Hindu about them,” he said.

When quizzed about the cases of violence against Dalits and other minority communities in India, Gandhi said it requires “political imagination” to combat the issue “head-on” and that the opposition is committed to that fight.

He said, “What the BJP and the RSS are trying to do is to stop the expression, the participation of lower castes, other backward castes, tribals and minority communities. And, for me, an India where a Dalit person or a Muslim person, tribal person, upper-caste person, anybody, is being mistreated, is being attacked, is not the India I want.”

Gandhi, who is presently on a tour of Europe added, “The feeling right now is that you can do whatever you want and nothing’s going to happen to you. This is an attack on the soul of India, and the people doing this should pay a price for it. If the Prime Minister tomorrow morning was to decide there would be no chest thumping and no violence in India, it would stop. It is the direction that the leadership of the country gives, the imagination that the leadership of a country gives that shapes people.”

Pointing to his own experiences, Gandhi said that there are 24 legal cases against him and that for the “first time in Indian history” somebody was given the maximum sentence for criminal defamation. The former Congress president was referring to his conviction in a 2019 defamation case over his Modi surname remark. Last month, the Supreme Court stayed his conviction and paved the way for revival of his Lok Sabha membership. He stressed that the fight to keep the democratic structure of India is “ongoing and very vibrant”.

“We are part of that fight; we are going through a process; we are going through turbulence in our democratic structure and there are millions of people who really believe in that democratic structure and are going to defend it with everything that they’ve got. So, it’s a fight and also an opportunity to rethink and to reimagine our country. There are many things that can be improved, and I think this is an opportunity, this is a test that many countries go through. And, I think we’ll come out just fine in this test,” he said.

Speaking on the debate around the name of the country, Gandhi stated that the government was acting in “strange ways” because it was “irritated” with the name of the opposition’s Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.). He added that both India and Bharat are documented in the Constitution.

“There is something deeper that is going on, which is that people who want to change the name of anything are basically trying to deny history. The fact of the matter is, whether we like it or we don’t like it, we have a history. We were ruled by the British, we fought the British, we defeated the British. English is spoken by more Indians than English people; it’s our own language more than theirs,” he said.

He added, “Embedded in that English is a huge history, lot of pain, lot of happiness, imagination, struggle, those things are embedded. And the people who want to change the name want to erase that; they don’t want the history of our country is known to our future generations, it disturbs them.”

Gandhi also countered the idea that the majority of India had voted for the current political dispensation and claimed that 60 per cent of the country had voted for the current opposition alliance.

“…this idea that the majority community is voting for the BJP, is wrong. The majority community actually votes more for us than they vote for them. They do polarise society, they divide society, they spread hatred in society and that is their mechanism. They also happen to have very good relationships with the most powerful, richest crony capitalists in the land, who finance and support them,” said Gandhi.

With regard to crony capitalism, Gandhi again attacked the Adani Group and claimed that “documentation is available” to back the opposition’s allegations of monopolistic practices.

“What you have in India today with Mr Adani is so blatant and it’s completely so over the top, I don’t think there’s any other place where this is going on. The gentleman is in pretty much every single business; eventually he’s going to be held accountable for it,” he said.

The Paris session was chaired by Arancha Gonzalez, Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences PO, who asked him about India’s foreign policy stance. Professor Christophe Jaffrelot, Director of the Centre of International Studies moderated the session.