In Hamburg, Congress president Rahul Gandhi blames joblessness, demonetisation, GST for lynchings

“Large numbers of people who worked in small businesses were forced back to the villages and these three things that the government has done has made India angry. And that’s what you get to read in the newspapers. When you hear about lynchings, when you hear about attacks on Dalits in India, when you hear about attacks on minorities in India, that’s the reason for it,” he stated.

Gandhi also accused the BJP government of excluding tribals, Dalits and minorities from the development process. “It is very dangerous in the 21st century to exclude people. If you don’t give people a vision in the 21st century somebody else will give them one. And that’s the real risk of excluding large number of people from our development processes,” he said.

“They (the BJP government) feel that tribal communities, poor farmers, lower caste people, minorities shouldn’t get the same benefits as the elite,” the Congress president alleged.

Referring to his famous hug, after a no-holds-barred attack during a Parliament debate last month, Gandhi said, “When I hugged PM Modi in Parliament, some within my party did not like it.”

The Congress president also talked about his father, former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assailants. “When I saw the man who killed my father lying dead in a field in Sri Lanka, I did not like it, I saw his crying children in him,” he said.

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) Velupillai Prabhakaran, responsible for the killing of Rajiv Gandhi, was shot dead by Sri Lankan troops in 2009.

With PTI inputs

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