New Delhi: Being spied on, Bharat Jodo Yatra, encountering “militants” during its Kashmir leg and the alleged threat to Indian democracy — Rahul Gandhi’s closed-door address at the Cambridge Judge Business School, UK, covered all this and more.
A video of the Tuesday speech — ‘Learning to Listen in the 21st Century’ — was released by Congress leader Sam Pitroda Friday on YouTube.
He talked about how democracy, which he described as “public good”, has come under attack in India and about the alleged persecution of the Opposition — from being arrested for protesting outside Parliament to their speeches being expunged in Parliament. In this context, he also talked about Israeli spyware Pegasus and its alleged use in spying on him.
“I myself had Pegasus on my phone. A large number of politicians had Pegasus on their phones. I have been called by intelligence officers who told me, ‘Please be careful about what you are saying on the phone because we are sort of recording the stuff’. This is the constant pressure we feel,” Gandhi said.
Quoting the report of an SC-appointed committee set up last year to look into the allegations of the government using Pegasus to track people’s phones, he said: “We are concerned about the technical committee report. Twenty-nine phones were given and in five phones some malware was found, but the technical committee says it cannot be Pegasus.”
Talking about the “importance of listening”, Rahul recounted how he met “militants” in Kashmir during his Bharat Jodo Yatra. He was asked by the government and security forces to not walk this leg but, he said, he continued in spite of their warnings. During this time, a man approached him and said that he and the group of people with him were “militants”. “I thought I was in trouble because terrorists would kill me in this situation. But they did not do anything. That is the power of listening,” he said.
In the hour-long address, Gandhi also spoke about two divergent perspectives in the world — “the American view of things and the Chinese view of things” — and how these two should be thought of in the global context.
Rahul is on a week-long visit to the UK and will be meeting members of the India diaspora there.
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‘Bharat Jodo Yatra wasn’t about the distance’
In his speech, Rahul mentioned that he had a number of “criminal libel” cases against him “for things that should, under no circumstances, be criminal libel cases”. “That’s what we are trying to defend,” he said.
“The institutional framework required for a democracy — Parliament, free press, the judiciary, just the idea of mobilisation, moving around — all are getting constrained. So, we are facing an attack on the basic structure of Indian democracy,” he said.
This is Gandhi’s first trip abroad since the Bharat Jodo Yatra concluded in January in Kashmir.
The distance covered by the Bharat Jodo Yatra — over 4,000 km — Rahul said was “irrelevant” and that the yatra was more about the “energy that was embedded into it”.
“Six people died during the yatra and many suffered injuries. What was a political idea suddenly became a personal one. People started talking about things that we never thought they would talk about. We witnessed the emotional outburst of people,” he said.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)