Rahul Gandhi pitches for inclusive politics & speaks about relationship between communal harmony & growth

NEW DELHI: The imageries in Rahul Gandhi’s speech may have been of horses and beehives, but there was clearly one elephant in the room — Gujarat CM Narendra Modi. He did not name Modi even once in his speech, but there were enough references to the style and substance of BJP leader’s politics to remove any doubt as to who was in his crosshairs as he sketched out his idea of India.

He pitched for inclusive politics and again and again spoke of the relationship between communal and social harmony and the sustainability of economic growth, clearly attempting to differentiate himself from BJP’s Hindutva brand of politics, which Congress says leaves a significant section of the population out. “When you play the politics of alienating communities, you stop the movement of people and ideas. When that happens we all suffer. Businesses suffer and the seeds of disharmony are sown and the dreams of our people are severely disrupted,” he said. “The biggest danger is excluding people, excluding the poor, the middle class, tribals, Dalits. Whenever we excluded women, the minorities, 200 million Muslims in India, we have always fallen back.”

If minorities were one issue in which Gandhi sought to present a picture of contrast, China was another, especially the India vs China theme, a theme constantly visited by Modi, most recently in a recent address to students of Delhi’s Shri Ram College of Commerce. But he broke with the traditional Chinese dragon versus Indian elephant narrative, characterising India as a beehive, and its approach to growth a soft, friendly and inclusive one. He put his arm around CII’s Ajay S Shriram as a demonstration of the Indian approach, contrasting it with a hard clasp of the wrist for the Chinese. Inference was clear — Congress was large hearted while Modi was hard. But perhaps the most direct hit that he took on Modi was on the question on leadership and its nature. Modi, who has never made secret his desire for the job of prime minister, and Gandhi who has the mantle of the reluctant inheritor, are anyway a study in contrasts.