WEB DESK
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi who is on a weeklong tour of the United Kingdom in his latest comments said that the Narendra Modi-led Union government does not allow any idea of the Opposition.
Congress leader on Sunday termed the contest as a fight between courage and cowardice. Speaking to Indian diaspora in London, Rahul also said that an Indian leader could address the University of Cambridge or Harvard University but not an Indian university as the Narendra Modi-led government does not allow any discussion whether it’s inside or outside of the Parliament.
Rahul is on a weeklong tour of the United Kingdom. He gave a talk at the Cambridge earlier.
He said, “The more they attack me, the better that is for me, because the more I understand…It’s a fight between courage and cowardice. It’s a fight between respect and disrespect, between love and hatred. As I said during the Yatra: nafrat ke bazaar mein, hum mohabbat ki dukaan kholne aaye hain (in a market of hatred, we want to set up a shop that spreads love).”
Referring to the People’s Liberation Army of China sitting over 2,000 square kilometres of Indian territory, the Congress MP referred to Indian Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar saying in an interview that India could not afford to fight an economically stronger China. “At the heart of the ideology is cowardice…,” he added.
“The Foreign Minister of the country is saying …China is stronger than us, so we can’t fight with them. The British were stronger than us, so then we should not have fought with them?” earlier at an interaction with Indian journalists in London, he had recalled Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s public denial of any Chinese intrusion into Indian territory. At the interaction the Congress MP had declared that democracy in India is a ‘public good’ and while the Indian opposition was engaged in fighting to
protect it, defenders of democracy in the Western World were silent. “So, this is a fight between courage and cowardice. It’s a fight between respect and disrespect…,” he added.
Earlier, he gave a lecture at the University of Cambridge where also he blasted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Modi government.
Indian immigrants, he said, had made the country proud not because they have achieved professional and material success in foreign countries, but because they have demonstrated abroad what Indian values really are. “The real reason you made us proud is because you respect the people you live with, you respect the different cultures, you respect the fact that you are living in England, you listen to their perspective, you embrace their perspective, you tell them about our perspective and in that way, both groups of people improve and do better… you have shown what an actual Indian person should be doing…. living peacefully, affectionately with respect, listening to other people, learning from other people and teaching other people what we know,” he went on to add.