‘Tamil, Marathi inferior, they say…’: Rahul Gandhi slams RSS in Virginia, US

Congress Member of Parliament (MP) Rahul Gandhi alleged that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) doesn’t understand India and calls certain states and religions inferior to others.
The Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha is on a three-day visit to the United States of America.
“What the RSS is basically 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…This is what the fight is about. We are of the opinion whether you are from Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan….. all of you have your history, tradition and language. Every single one of them is as important as any other one,” Gandhi said addressing Indian diaspora community in Herndon, Virginia, US on Monday.
The RSS is the ideological mentor of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“What would you do if somebody told you that you cannot speak Tamil? How would you feel? How would you react? That is the ideology of the RSS- That Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Manipuri- are all inferior languages. It ends up in the polling booth, Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha,” he said.
Gandhi who arrived in US on Sunday, also met with students at Georgetown University before the diaspora event in Virginia. He will attend events in Washington before heading back to Delhi.
“But the fight is about what type of India we are going to have. Are we going to have an India where people are allowed to believe what they want to believe?… Or we are going to have an India where only few limited people can decide what is going to happen and the problem is that these people don’t understand India,” the Congress leader said.
Gandhi continued his criticism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), claiming that the ‘fear’ of Prime Minister Narendra Modi among the public has dissipated following the results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) failing to cross the 300-seat mark and the BJP stopped at 240 seats – 32 short of the majority mark in the 543-member Lower House of Parliament in the 2024 general elections. The Congress bagged 99 seats with the INDIA bloc ending at about 294 seats in Lok Sabha.