Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has alleged that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is pushing an agenda that amounts to the “elimination of the Constitution”, which guarantees equal rights to all citizens. Gandhi said the Opposition would build a system of resistance that would ultimately remove the BJP from power in India.
Speaking at the Hertie School in Berlin, the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha also alleged that the BJP has launched a full-scale assault and has captured the institutional framework of the country to help use it as a tool for building its political power, and that is what the opposition is fighting against.
In an hour-long video released by the Congress on Monday night, Gandhi said India's largest and complex democracy is a global asset, and the "assault" on the Indian democratic system is also an attack on the global democratic system.
"What the BJP is proposing essentially is the elimination of the Constitution. Elimination of the idea of equality between states, elimination of the idea of equality between languages and religions, elimination of the idea of the central core of the Constitution, which is that every individual will have the same value," Gandhi said to a group of students at the Hertie School last week.
In the video, 'Politics is the art of listening', Gandhi said that when there is an attack on the democratic system, the opposition has to find ways to counter it and not merely say that there is a problem with the elections.
"We will deal with it, and we will create a method, a system of opposition resistance that will succeed. But, we're not fighting the BJP. You have to understand that we're fighting their capture of the Indian institutional structure," he said.
Answering queries of students, Gandhi claimed there is a weaponisation of the institutional framework.
"We fundamentally believe that there is a problem with the electoral machinery in India. The second thing is that there is a wholesale capture of our institutional framework. There is a full-scale assault taking place on the institutional framework of our country," he claimed.
The Congress leader noted that there is an atmosphere in India where the institutions are not performing the role they should be performing.
Gandhi said while the Europeans struggled to build a European Union, India built an economic and political union in 1947, which was based on the Constitution.
"If you are going to have any conversation about democracy on the planet, you cannot ignore by far the largest and most complex democracy in the world. That is why I say Indian democracy is a global public good; it is not just an Indian asset, it is a global asset.
"So when I talk of the attack on the Indian democratic system, I don't say it, but it is actually an attack not just on the Indian democratic system, it is an attack on the global democratic system," Gandhi observed.
Attacking the BJP, he claimed that the Congress had clearly shown without a shadow of a doubt that they "won" the Haryana election, and asserted that "we actually don't feel that the Maharashtra election was fair".
Gandhi also attacked enforcement agencies like the CBI and the ED and said that while the Congress helped build the institutional framework, it never viewed it as its own but that of the country.
"But, that's not how the BJP sees (it). It views the institutional framework of India as belonging to them. So they use it as a tool for building political power," he alleged.
He alleged the ED and the CBI have been weaponised. "Going by the number of cases that the ED and the CBI have against BJP people and against the opposition, one would find that most of them are political cases," he said.
Gandhi also attacked the economic model of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
PM Modi, the BJP and the RSS have essentially taken the economic models of Manmohan Singh and taken them right forward, he claimed. "What Mr Modi is trying to do economically cannot go further... it is jammed," he alleged.
Rahul Gandhi was in Germany last week. The BJP on Saturday alleged that Rahul Gandhi had a meeting with "enemies of India" during his visit to Germany and demanded transparency in the engagements of Leader of the Opposition with "global actors abroad".
Addressing a press conference at the BJP headquarters here, party national spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia showed a purported picture of Gandhi with Berlin-based Hertie school president and professor Cornellia Woll and called it "proof" of the Congress leader meeting "anti-India forces in Germany".
Bhatia claimed that Woll is one of the trustees of the Central European University, which is funded by US-based billionaire investor George Soros's Open Society Foundation.