London : Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Friday compared the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) with the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist organization, and said the RSS wanted to “capture” every institution of the country.
The RSS was trying to change the very nature of India, he alleged.
Rahul Gandhi was speaking at an event in London in the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS). Gandhi said: “We are fighting an organisation called the RSS, which is trying to change the nature of India. There is no other organisation in India that wants to capture India’s institutions,” he added.
Gandhi said: “What we are dealing with is a completely new idea. It is similar to the idea that exists in the Arab world in the form of Muslim Brotherhood. And the idea is that an ideology should run through every institutions, one idea should crush all other ideas.”
Citing a few examples, he said: “You see the response of four Supreme Court judges, who came out and said ‘we are not being allowed to do our work’. You see Raghuram Rajan (former RBI Governor) and the shock of demonetisation. You can see India’s institions being torn down one by one. That requires a response, a response that has to include all who value what India has achieved,” he said.
Gandhi said the decision on demonetisation bypassed every single institution. “Demonetisation was an attack on small and medium businesses, which is India’s real power,” he said.
“It took a week for economists to figure out what has been done (by demonetization). The RBI was not spoken to, the finance minister didn’t know of it. The cabinet was locked up. The idea came from the RSS directly,” he said.
On lessons learnt from the electoral defeat in 2014, Gandhi said: “That you have to listen, the leadership is about listening, leadership is about empathy. At a party level, I think there was a certain degree of arrogance that had crept into the Congress. So, never forget that the party is actually the people. That’s a lesson for every body in the Congress,” he added.
—IANS
