Cong will have to gather resistance to recover: Rahul
NEW DELHI: The Congress will have to “gather the resistance” across all fronts to make a comeback, Rahul Gandhi said on Tuesday, even as he criticised the Narendra Modi-led government’s economic policies and cautioned against India becoming the “battlefield” of a tussle between the US and China. In an hour-and-a-halflong Facebook Live conversation with Kaushik Basu, a professor of economics at Cornell University who was also India’s former chief economic adviser during the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, Gandhi spoke in detail about his views on personal, political and policy issues.
He also said the Emergency imposed by late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was wrong.
Gandhi criticised the government’s economic policies as supply-side-driven when, he said, the economy needed a demand-side intervention, and advocated a decentralised approach to deal with India’s climate challenge. “India will have to bite the manufacturing bullet in order to give employment to its youth and a country of 1.3 billion people cannot run on the service sector,” he said in the session, which also included questions from Cornell’s students and faculty members.
“What worked from 1990 to 2012 (for the economy) will not work anymore, and this government is trying to do exactly that,” Gandhi said, hinting that bipartisan consensus around economic reforms may need a rethink. The Congress is not against big business, but it cannot be the only game in town, Gandhi said while accusing the current government of promoting “crony capitalism”.
When asked about his vision for the Congress after several electoral setbacks, Gandhi said the party will have to “gather the resistance” which exists “across all fronts”.
“Congress party will have to have the humility and flexibility” and “bring together India’s power”, he said. “The party has to submit itself to the Indian people... and it has to be humble, and it is not an easy transformation,” Gandhi said. “But it is in our DNA to do it,” he added.
Spelling out his vision for India-us -China ties, Gandhi said “a superpower (China) is arising” and “rise of that superpower is moving things around... and the hope is that the two superpowers (US and China) do not collide... and hopefully they manage the situation and find a way of coexisting with each other”.
“As a country that is neighbouring China and close to the US, superpowers like to collide, and they do not like to collide on their territory... the nightmare for India is, we become the battlefield of that collision (between US and China). That’s something that good foreign policy in India has to manoeuvre around... that is going to take wisdom on part of the US, China and India.” he said.
“India will have to make sure that China and US do not go to war, we are the bridge to both these cultures,” Gandhi added.
Speaking about India’s environmental and pollution-related challenges, Gandhi underlined the fact that a country like India cannot be on the same page with rich countries in dealing with environmental issues, given the costs associated with shifting to cleaner fuels.
Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has previously attacked Gandhi, saying he is becoming the “doomsday man” of India, building “fake narratives” that “demean” the country.