Continuing his attack against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS), senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday compared the organisation with madrassas run by radical Islamists in Pakistan. The Gandhi scion also insinuated that the RSS is doing something “fundamentally different” and planting its people in the various institutions of the country.
Gandhi made the claims in a video interaction with Kaushik Basu, a professor at Cornell University in the US and a known Congress sympathiser. When one of Basu’s colleagues questioned Gandhi about the cause of anxieties people in India are having regarding their children, he responded by pinning the blame on the RSS. Gandhi said that the entire education system in the country is under attack and that RSS is running schools the same as radical Islamic madarsas in Pakistan.
1 hour and 13 minutes into the interaction, Rahul Gandhi started speaking about schools run by RSS and claimed that the RSS is running schools like Islamist madarsas in Pakistan. He even enquired about the financial resources of RSS to run the thousands of schools.
“The entire education system in India is targeted. The rewriting of history, subtle rewriting of social norms, subtle attacks on the ideas of the Indian constitution, subtle attacks on the ideas of equality…These are ideas that modern India requires, you absolutely need to reclaim them. What is going on is an attack on the idea of equality. By the way, the RSS began the attack through their schools….much like the radical Islamists use their madrassas in Pakistan, the RSS uses its school to push a particular worldview,” Gandhi said.
In addition, Rahul Gandhi also raised aspersions on the funding received by the schools run by the RSS.
“Nobody questions where does the RSS gets the money for running hundreds and thousands of schools. These are not profit-making organisations. So nobody is asking the question. So absolutely, it is the capture of the Indian education system and the Indian education system is got to be taken back from the hands,” Gandhi added.
Durba Ghosh, the person asking the questions to Rahul Gandhi said that she has twenty cousins in India and all of them are worried about their children because current India does not have opportunities for those children like there once were. It is not clear what kind of opportunities she was referring to.
Rahul Gandhi rambles, resorts to lying and misinformation in his conversation with Kaushik Basu
Besides, Gandhi spoke on a host of issues with the Cornell University professor Kaushik Basu and provided enough instances for viewers to tickle their funny bones. Gandhi is undoubtedly a gift that keeps on giving, and on Tuesday night he demonstrated it once again why he is considered to be funnier than most of the unfunny comedians in the country.
Speaking on the geopolitics between the US and China and India’s role in it, Gandhi haphazardly threw the word ‘strategy’ multiple times in his response, presumably to appear as intellectual and clued-in about challenges facing India. Rahul also rambled on the ‘visions’ he had for the country but failed in articulating them in clear and precise terms. Subsequently, he resorted to his default ‘strategy’—lie unabashedly to attack the Modi government—and went about spreading misinformation and lies about the farm laws. You can read other amusing tidbits of Rahul’s conversation with Kaushik Basu here.
