Rahul Gandhi’s swipe at PM, RSS again at US event: 56 inch is history now

Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, who is currently on a three-day visit to the US, again launched scathing attacks against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

He said the sense of fear that prevailed among people before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls has now disappeared, while the “idea of Mr Modi, 56-inch chest, direct connection with god, that’s all gone, it’s history now”.

Addressing the Indian diaspora community in Herndon, Virginia, on Monday, the Congress leader said that “something has definitely changed” in India following the general elections, adding that the atmosphere of fear vanished.

“The BJP and PM had spread so much fear, including pressure from the media and agencies. But everything vanished within seconds. It took them years to spread this fear with a lot of planning and money, but it took only a second for all of this to end.”

Taking a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said, “You can see this, I get to see this in Parliament. I see the Prime Minister right up front and I can tell you that the idea of Mr Modi, 56-inch chest, direct connection with god, that’s all gone, it’s history now.”

In his attack against the RSS, the Congress MP slammed the right-wing organisation for “calling certain states inferior to others”. He said the reason why the RSS says this is because “they do not understand India”.

“What the RSS is saying is that certain states are inferior to other states. Certain languages are inferior to other languages. Certain religions are inferior to other religions, and certain communities are inferior to other communities,’ he said.

“Whether you are from Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, all of you have your history, tradition, language. And every single one of them is as important as the other one. The ideology of the RSS is that Tamil, Manipuri, Marathi, Bengali are all inferior languages.

“That’s what the fight is all about. It ends up in the polling booth or the Lok Sabha. But the fight is about what type of India we are going to have,” Rahul Gandhi added.

He further said that “the problem with these people is that they don’t understand India”.

Not only did he attack the RSS for understanding the nation, Rahul Gandhi launched a similar attack on the BJP, saying the party has failed to grasp that India belongs to everyone.

“India is a union, as clearly outlined in our Constitution. It states unequivocally that India, or Bharat, is a union of states. This union encompasses our diverse histories, traditions, music, and dance. Yet, they (BJP) say it is not a union, it is different.”

After speaking in Virginia, Rahul Gandhi headed to Georgetown University in Washington D.C. where he particpated in an interactive session.

At the session, the Congress leader said he sensed halfway through his election campaign, that the Prime Minister “didn’t think he was near 300-400 seats”.

“We knew when he said that ‘I speak directly to God’, we knew that we had blown him apart. Internally, we saw this as a psychological collapse… The coalition that brought Narendra Modi to power has collapsed, it has broken right at the middle,” he added.

This was the second consecutive day of Rahul Gandhi attacking the BJP, RSS and the Prime Minister.

In similar comments on Monday, he told the Indian community in Texas that people have lost their fear of Prime Minister Modi and the BJP after the party failed to get a majority on its own in this year’s general elections.

“The other thing that happened was that the fear of the BJP vanished. We saw that immediately, within minutes of the election result, nobody in India was scared of the BJP or the Prime Minister of India,” he had said.

On the RSS, he said that the right-wing organisation “believes that India is one idea, while we believe that India is a multiplicity of ideas”.

Rahul Gandhi also said that the battle against the BJP and RSS became clear during the Lok Sabha election, when millions of Indians “realised that the Prime Minister was attacking the Constitution of India”.