Modi's BJP a one-man show, RSS running India: Rahul Gandhi
"If it is about the farmers, only one man knows the answers. If it is education, again the same man knows. If you want to talk about clothes, then also the same man is the authority," Rahul said at a NSUI event in New Delhi.
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday launched a sharp and frontal attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing him of running a one-man show and his party, the BJP, of lacking internal democracy, saying only the ideology of the RSS now rules India.
"If it is about the farmers, only one man knows the answers. If it is education, again the same man knows. If you want to talk about clothes, then also the same man is the authority," Rahul said at a NSUI event in New Delhi in what was yet another swipe at Modi's monogrammed pin-striped Rs 10 lakh suit.
After he returned from a controversial 56-day sabbatical last month, Rahul, in his first intervention during the land bill debate in Parliament, had called the Modi government a 'suit-boot ki sarkar', a remark he has repeated at various occasions after that.
Attacking Modi on economy, Rahul took a jibe at the prime minister's meeting with Manmohan Singh on Wednesday. "Modi took lessons from Manmohan Singh on how to run India's economy," he said inviting a loud cheer from the Congress workers at the meeting.
The 44-year-old Congress leader also hit out at Modi's 18 foreign trips in a year, saying, "US was done, Nepal was visited. Even Mongolia was visited, but the prime minister will not visit a farmer's house," he said.
Rahul spent a good part of his brief, 15-minute address attacking the RSS, the ideological mentor of the BJP, accusing the right-wing organisation of forcing its ideas upon a "complex" nation through its saffronisation campaign. "Go to an RSS shakha. What do you see there? Order. People in one straight line. Nobody is allowed to speak," he said.
"Talk to any RSS leader. They say this is how things should be and this is how the country should be run. Nothing will change for thousands of years and nothing will change for thousands of years," the Congress leader said. "There is no internal dialogue in the BJP. Now they want to stop the internal dialogue in India," he said.
"Earlier the best scientists used to discuss the IITs, now they say they don't want to get into this. Why? Because there is just one ideology ruling India," he said.
Pitching his party, the Congress, as an antidote to the "authoritarian" BJP, Rahul said, "Only Congress brings in the complexity of India into a room and lets everybody have a say... Let the Congress disorder take on the RSS insistence on order."