Following Rahul Gandhi’s speech at Santa Clara in California, where he attacked the BJP accusing it of ‘threatening people and misusing central agencies’, former union minister and senior BJP leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi criticised Gandhi saying that it is because of democracy, a leader can go abroad and ‘criticise’ the elected government.
“If India was not a democracy, would any leader be able to go abroad and criticise the duly elected government of the country?” Naqvi said, as quoted by PTI.
Addressing the Indian diaspora at the Silicon Valley Campus of the University of California in Santa Cruz on Tuesday, Gandhi asserted that the ruling BJP can be defeated if the Opposition is “aligned properly” and the Congress party is working towards it and it is “coming along very nicely”.
The Congress leader arrived in Santa Clara in the United States on Tuesday on a three-city US tour during which he will interact with the Indian diaspora and meet American lawmakers.
He added that he can clearly see “vulnerabilities” in the BJP. “As a political entrepreneur, I can clearly see vulnerabilities in the BJP… The BJP can be defeated if the Opposition is aligned properly,” he said.
Citing the instance of the recent Karnataka elections, where the Congress won a massive mandate, winning 135 seats in the 224-member Assembly, Gandhi told the Indian diaspora that the party had used a completely different approach, and its elements came out of the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’, which he undertook from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.
He also hit out at the BJP government, saying that the saffron party was “threatening” the people and “misusing” the country’s central agencies.
“The BJP is threatening people and misusing government agencies. The Bharat Jodo Yatra started because all the instruments that we needed to connect with the people were controlled by the BJP-RSS,” he said, adding, “We were also finding that in some way, it had become quite difficult to act politically. And that’s why we decided to walk from the southernmost tip of India to Srinagar,” he said.
He also explained that he came up with the line of “Nafrat ki bazaar mein mohabbat ki dukaan kholi (opened a shop of love in the market of hatred).”
The Congress leader said that when he started the Bharat Jodo Yatra, in the initial days, an old knee injury started acting up, and he was in a lot of pain. However, one afternoon, after walking 25 km every day for three weeks, “he suddenly realised he was not feeling tired at all”.
“I’d get up in the morning, 6 o’clock we used to start, and we used to end walking around 7.30-8 in the evening. I was like it is very strange that I’m not feeling tired at all. Then I started asking people around if they are feeling tired. They said no they are not. I started to think about it and I realised that actually it was not us that was walking, it was India walking with us,” he said.
“And the large mass of people who were coming… all religion, all communities, kids… they were creating an atmosphere of love and affection… that nobody was feeling tired. All were walking together, and helping each other. And that’s where we came up with the idea: Nafrat ki bazaar mein mohabbat ki dukaan kholi,” he told the Indian community attending the programme itself was named ‘Mohabbat ki Dukaan’.