Rahul Gandhi blames unemployment for lynching; cites ISIS to warn Modi government against discrimination

Congress president Rahul Gandhi, who is on a four-day tour in United Kingdom and Germany, on Wednesday took a jibe at the Narendra Modi-led BJP government, saying that the incidents of mob-lynching across India are due to anger emanating from joblessness and "destruction" of small businesses due to demonetisation and the "poor" GST, implemented by the Centre.

Launching a scathing attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime, Gandhi at Bucerius Summer School, Hamburg also traced on the issues of insurgency and said that the Modi government’s scheme to exclude tribals, Dalits and minorities from the development narrative "could be dangerous" to the nation.

"It is very dangerous in the 21st century to exclude people. If you don't give people a vision in the 21st century somebody else will give them one," the Congress president was quoted as saying in Germany.

Referring to the example of ISIS creation across the world the Gandhi scion said, "And that's the real risk of excluding a large number of people from our development processes". "They (the BJP government) feel that tribal communities, poor farmers, lower caste people, minorities shouldn't get the same benefits as the elite," he alleged.

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To hit out at India's informal economy, Rahul Gandhi further criticised the implementation of demonetisation and GST reform a couple of years back by the Narendra Modi government. The Congress chief also accused the ruling BJP the cash flow of all small and medium businesses rendering millions jobless.

Asserting that the transformation taking place in the world requires certain protection for people, he accused the current dispensation in India of taking these protections away from them and hitting the informal economy through demonetisation and GST, causing anger which is leading to lynching incidents.

"They imposed a badly conceptualised GST which complicated lives further. Large numbers of people who worked in small businesses were forced back to the villages and these three things that the government has done has made India angry," Gandhi said.

"And that's what you get to read in the newspapers. When you hear about lynching, when you hear about attacks on Dalits in India, when you hear about attacks on minorities in India, that's the reason for it," Rahul went on to claim further.

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Gandhi also claimed that there is a big job problem all over India but the prime minister has turned his blind eye to the matter. "You have to (first) accept the problem, to fix it," he said. Gandhi also spoke about India and its progress over the last 70 years.

Referring to his famous hug, after a no-holds-barred attack during a Parliament debate last month, Gandhi said, "When I hugged PM Modi in Parliament, some within my party did not like it."

The Congress president also talked about his father, former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi's assailants. "My father was killed by a terrorist in 1991. When the same terrorist died a few years later, I wasn't happy. I saw myself in his children," Rahul concluded.