Rahul Gandhi’s comments have triggered a major row with regional parties, when he said it is only the Congress which can defeat the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). He has now said he was ‘misconstrued,’ and added that his party does not want to be the ‘big daddy’ in the fight against the BJP.
“The point I made in Udaipur, which was misconstrued, is that it is an ideological battle now. This means that of course we respect (ally) the DMK as a Tamil political organisation, but the Congress is the party that has the ideology at the national level,” he said on Friday at the ‘Ideas for India’ conference taking place in London.
The Wayanad MP further said, “We have to coordinate with our friends in the opposition. I don’t view the Congress as the ‘big daddy.’ It is a group effort with the opposition. But it is a fight to regain India.”
The former president of the country’s grand and oldest party further mentioned that regional parties have their own space, and that the Congress has its own. “However, the ideological battle is taking place between the national vision of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and that of the Congress,” he said.
Gandhi’s ‘clarification’ comes in after his earlier remarks led to widespread controversy and a major row in the presence of opposition leaders such as Sitaram Yechury and Tejashwi Yadav.
On May 15, speaking on the third and final day of the party’s ‘Chintan Shivir’ in Udaipur, Gandhi had said in a statement, “The BJP will talk about the Congress, its leaders and workers, but will not talk about regional parties. They know that regional parties have their place but they cannot defeat the BJP because they (state parties) don’t have an ideology.”
His comments came at a time when the nation is just two years away from the next general elections, and, with the Congress suffering a series of electoral reverses, and defections, it currently governs only Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan–there have been murmurs of a non-Congress, non-BJP third front. In each of the previous two general elections, in 2014 and 2019, the BJP secured majority on its own, while the Sonia Gandhi-led outfit won just 44 and 52 seats, respectively.
The two arch-rivals go head-to-head in approximately 200 of the total 543 Lok Sabha seats. Of these, in 2019, the saffron party won 170 out of 186 seats.
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