Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has alleged that the general election held in India this summer was not fought on equal grounds. He said the election has destroyed the idea of Narendra Modi.
The Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, who is currently on a four-day visit to the United States, made the remarks at the prestigious Georgetown University here on Monday.
Addressing the event, Mr Gandhi said the ruling coalition had collapsed and was “torn apart”.
“It is not just about the prime minister, it is much more serious than that. What has happened in India is that the coalition that brought Mr (Narendra) Modi to power has broken. It has split in the middle,” Mr Gandhi said.
“So you will see in these elections that he will have to struggle. Because the basic idea that Mr Modi is running the government for the people of India is gone,” he said.
Alleging that the Lok Sabha elections were not fought on an equal footing, Mr Gandhi said, “I don’t consider it a free election. I consider it a very controlled election.” “I don’t believe the BJP would even come close to 240 seats in a fair election. I would be surprised,” he said, stressing that the party had a “huge financial advantage”.
“The Election Commission was doing what it wanted. The entire campaign was designed in such a way that Mr Modi could implement his agenda across the country, with different schemes for different states,” Mr Gandhi claimed.
He said, “The Congress party fought the elections despite its bank accounts being frozen and has basically destroyed the idea of Modi. You can see this because when you see the Prime Minister in Parliament… he is psychologically trapped and basically he is not able to accept it, he is not able to understand how this happened.”
Responding to a question, Mr Gandhi said halfway through the campaign, Prime Minister Modi did not think he would get 300 or 400 seats.
“I think they realised right from the beginning that something was going wrong. We were getting inputs from regular sources…it was quite clear that they were in trouble,” he said.
“So, there was this internal talking going on inside the Prime Minister that I could see. And psychologically, how is this happening now? Because he is a person, as you know, he lived in Gujarat for many years, never faced political adversity, then became the Prime Minister of India. Suddenly, this idea started breaking down,” Mr Gandhi said.
“We knew. When he said I talk directly to God, we knew we had really isolated him. And that psychology was over. So people think, well, it was like the Prime Minister was saying, look, ‘I am special, I am unique, and I talk to God’. But we didn’t see it that way. Internally, we saw it as a psychological breakdown, what happened here? How is this thing not working?” he said.
“That view has now been changed,” he said.
Mr Gandhi, who arrived in the US on Saturday, met Indian expatriates and youth in Dallas, Texas. He also plans to meet lawmakers and senior US government officials in Washington DC.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
