As regional parties bristle at remark, Rahul Gandhi clarifies: ‘Congress doesn’t want to be Big Daddy’

During an interaction in London, Gandhi also said that the Congress was not winning elections because of polarisation and the dominance of the media by the BJP. He added that the fight in India is not a political fight, it is not a fight between one political organisation and a set of other political parties.

“We are now fighting the institutional structure of the Indian state which is being captured by an organisation which means the only way for us… we will get no respite from the institutional framework of our country… the only way for us is to go to the large mass of the India people. And that is not just the Congress… that is for all opposition parties,” he said.

He said the Congress will have to think about an organisational system which is much closer to a large mass of the people. “And we also have to think of large-scale mass movements on issues like unemployment, prices, regional issues and we have to coordinate with our friends in the opposition. So I don’t view the Congress as the big daddy. It is a group effort with the opposition but it is a fight to regain India.”

Democracy in India is a global public good. We’re the only people who have managed democracy at our unparalleled scale.

Had an enriching exchange on a wide range of topics at the #IdeasForIndia conference in London. pic.twitter.com/QyiIcdFfjN

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) May 20, 2022

Asked whether he was cementing collaboration with other parties to move forward, he said: “Yes. And the point I made in Udaipur which was misconstrued is that this is an ideological battle now and it is a national ideological battle which means that, of course, we respect… for example the DMK as a Tamil political organisation, but the Congress is the party that has the ideology at the national level. So the Congress will have to think about itself as a structure that is enabling the opposition. In no way is the Congress superior to the other opposition parties. We are all fighting the same battle… they have their space… we have our space. But the ideological battle that is taking place is between the national vision of the RSS and the national vision of the Congress,” he said.

In his concluding remarks at the Udaipur Chintan Shivir last week, Gandhi had said that the Congress alone can fight the BJP as the regional parties neither have an ideology nor a centralised approach. “Regional parties belong to some caste. They don’t represent everyone,” he had said.

“This battle cannot be fought by a regional party. Because this is a battle of ideology. The ideology of the RSS is fighting against the ideology of the Congress. BJP will talk about the Congress, its leaders and workers but will not talk about regional parties. Because they know that regional parties have a space but they cannot defeat the BJP because they don’t have an ideology. They have different approaches. We have a centralised approach. And our fight is about ideology,” he said.

On why the BJP is winning elections and Congress is not despite issues like unemployment and rising prices, he attributed it to “polarisation and total dominance of the media.”

“Also, there is another thing which one has to accept which is that the RSS has built a structure that has penetrated into the large mass. And the opposition parties and the Congress need to build such structures. And we need to go much more aggressively to the large mass of people… the 60-70 per cent of people who do not vote for the BJP and we need to do it together,” he said.