Rahul Gandhi on Sunday said that people support populist leaders like US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi because they are angry over not having jobs, as the Congress president stepped up his attack on the BJP and the RSS.
Interacting with Indian Journalists’ Association in London, Gandhi said that instead of solving the problem, these leaders ride on that anger and damage the country.
“People support populist leaders like Mr Trump and Mr Modi because they are angry that they don’t have a job. Instead of solving this problem these leaders ride on that anger. They damage the country by this,” he said.
On Saturday, Gandhi said India was facing a “full blown crisis” of unemployment and the Government was refusing to admit it.
The Congress president said there is a systematic attempt to impose one ideology on the country, the ideology coming straight from Nagpur. There are attempts to centralise power.
Gandhi again maintained that “there is a lot of similarity between Muslim Brotherhood and RSS. They use democratic processes to capture power”.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest political Islamist group in the Arab world. It is banned and declared as a terrorist organisation by the governments of several countries.
He said that “both the organisations were formed in the 1920s, both believe in institutional capture and both were banned, particularly the RSS was banned after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination”.
BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said in New Delhi that the likes of President Ram Nath Kovind, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who died last week, have an RSS background and Gandhi’s comparison of the organisation with an Islamist outfit is “unforgivable”.
He demanded immediate apology from the Congress president for likening the choice of Indians in an election with an organisation which, the BJP leader said, is declared a terror outfit in many countries.
Prasanta Patnaik