Threats to idea, structure of India, erosion of institutions: 2015-22, Rahul Gandhi @campus

At the May 23 Cambridge event, he said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was creating a vision of India that was not “inclusive”, adding: “I have studied Hinduism in enough detail to tell you that there’s absolutely nothing Hindu about wanting to murder people and beat people up.”

Five years ago, Rahul addressed a similar event – India @ 70 – at UC Berkeley. In the speech, he said “hatred, anger and violence and the politics of polarisation had raised its ugly head in India today”, and liberal institutions were being eroded.

During his online interviews and interactions in March and April 2021 for different universities – with Prof Kaushik Basu for Cornell University, Prof Ashutosh Varshney for Brown University and US diplomat Nicholas Burns for Harvard – Rahul said the BJP and the RSS have captured India’s institutional framework.

“There is not a single institution that is not under attack and it is systematically done. The judiciary, the press, the bureaucracy, the Election Commission… every single institution is systematically being filled by people who have a particular ideology and belong to a certain institution….I would not say eroding, I would say strangling,” he said in one such interaction.

In his conversation with Basu, he said even if the BJP is defeated, it would be hard to get rid of people in the “institutional structure”.

To Varshney, he said: “Even Saddam Hussain and Gaddafi used to have elections and win those, but there was no institutional framework to protect that vote.” He also said that electoral democracy can be “destroyed” in the 21st century if one can control social media and have financial dominance.

Speaking to students of IMT Business school in Dubai, January 2019, Gandhi said India’s “ethos” was built on “tolerance”.

In India, where most of his events on campuses have been informal interactions with students – the most recent one being with the students of Kochi’s St Theresa’s College in March 2021 – Rahul has spoken along the same lines.

At St Theresa’s, a student asked about the state of the Congress, to which he replied that his party believed in “conversation” with different castes, groups, religions in the country. “The conversation has broken down nationally.”

Speaking to students of Chennai’s Stella Maris College during the 2019 elections, he said he had “genuine” affection for Modi, adding: “People who do not have affection towards others are the ones who are not loved… That is why he (Modi) generates anger.”

He also interacted with students of Delhi University in February 2019 as part of a #YoungIndiaRising event. Here, he highlighted the “concentration” of wealth with a select few people, saying that “privatisation” was helping them.

Asked if intolerance was rising in the country, Rahul said the country’s history was of “bhaichaara (unity)”, and that the situation could improve if the PM conveyed these messages to people.

Even in November 2015, when he addressed a group of 2,000 students at Mount Carmel College in Bengaluru, he spoke along similar lines: “The idea of India is live and let live but the BJP and RSS mentality is to make one Indian fight against another.”

At the same event, Gandhi said the BJP doesn’t believe in holding talks with the Opposition. “They just know how to silence voices,” Rahul said.

In a more casual conversation during one of these interactions, the Congress leader told St Theresa’s students that he was trained in the Japanese martial art Aikido, and gave self-defence tips to a student. During the demonstration, he said: “The society in India is going to kick you, insult you and stop you from pursuing your interests. You got to understand where that push is coming from and position accordingly. Power is situational and you have to realise how that power is applied and take control.”