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Speech at the INDIA Alliance Conclave on June 8

Rahul Gandhi

I would like to welcome all of you here today. Thank you for coming.

Many years ago, I got into an argument with a very good friend of mine. I told him what you are doing is unfair. And his answer to me was: The world is unfair, get used to it.

It is not my place to answer any of the things that were said today about the Congress Party. It is my place to – like in the Shaiva tradition — swallow everything. The idea of the blue-necked One (Shiva) who drinks all the poison. Whatever more you want to say, whatever criticism you have of me or the Congress Party, we will accept it, and we will accept it happily with a smile on our face.

We will try to make you happy, because our role is fundamentally different from yours. I do not say this with arrogance. Our role, as many of you have stated, is to unite all of you together with love and affection.

I have been a MP of the Congress Party since 2004, when I fought my first election. Our party is fundamentally differently organised than all other parties in India and I say this with humility. Why? Because this party began as a resistance movement when modern India did not exist. Unlike all other political parties it was not built using the infrastructure and protection of the Indian state. The Congress Party is a Resistance movement protecting the idea that all Indians are Equal.

We are fundamentally opposed to the vision of the RSS. We will die — we will die in the Congress Party — before we stand with or compromise with the BJP or the RSS. You will have to cut off our heads to make it happen. I know lakhs and lakhs of Congress workers in this country who will say: Cut off our heads, we will not bow before the RSS.

I am sorry to say that there is confusion in this group. The confusion is that you — the SP, the TMC, the RJD, etc. — believe that the political instruments you have used so far will still work. These only worked when the Indian state provided a fair field for them to operate in. That field does not exist any more. The BJP controls the institutions of the state. The BJP controls the legal system. The BJP controls the bureaucracy. The BJP controls the intelligence agencies. The BJP even controls the Election Commission.

I have many friends in the TMC. They were convinced that they were sweeping the election. I kept telling them: you are in dream land. I have seen what happens – I have seen it in Gujarat, I have seen it in Madhya Pradesh, I have seen it in Chhattisgarh, I have seen it in Haryana and Maharashtra. And yet many of you are still not convinced.

The Congress Party is a party of resistance. It does not require the neutrality of the Indian state to operate. In fact, the more the institutions of the Indian state are throttled, the more aggressively the Congress Party will fight to defend the Constitution. All of us share the ideals of the Congress Party. What are those ideals? Satya, ahimsa and compassion.

What is the main issue here? I have no interest in fighting you. I would have to be a madman to suddenly get up and say I am going to fight you because you are our allies, you are our friends, you are the people we love. Please understand: we won the last election in 2024. We did not lose the 2024 election. You ask why Nitish ji left — it was not because of me, not because of the Congress.

And I will tell you that in the near future, even those few instruments that used to work will stop working, because the BJP and RSS are tightening their grip on the Indian state. The Congress Party faced this very same decision more than a hundred years ago. We were a political organisation before 1927. The day Gandhiji said we want independence, we became a Resistance movement.

If political parties can’t function, what functions? Resistance functions. Resistance works. Wherever we resist, it works. I have seen it with my own eyes. I have walked 4,000 kilometres across this country — resistance works. You don’t need political architecture. You don’t need the bureaucracy. You don’t need the intelligence agencies. You need the act of resistance — meaning: I will resist. I will not allow injustice. Full stop, the end. It is a spirit. It is not an organisation. It is a way of thinking — and whether we like it or not, that is where we have to go. The mindset has to change. The mindset must now be — we will not fight each other. We will not give the press a chance to attack us. We will resist.

You are thinking that the challenge is winning the next election. The next election is already won. Please understand: there is so much anger among the people of India that the next election is already over. The problem is the capture of the instruments of the Indian state by the RSS. The problem is that you will not have a free and fair election to win.

And so, we have to go into the mode of resistance. Resistance is CBSE. Resistance is NEET. Resistance is going to Great Nicobar. Resistance is the Bharat Jodo Yatra. You get up in the morning, and you say: how can I resist? And you resist. That will work. I guarantee you it will work. And from my perspective, I am more than happy to absorb any criticism from any quarter, because, for me, this is a religious duty. This is a spiritual duty. This is no longer politics. And that is why I promise you, I will bear every single humiliation that I have to bear to knit this group together and make it succeed.

How to proceed is very straightforward. We have to get away from a certain idea. Mamata ji is not 100% sure, but she is about 90% sure that her election was stolen from her. Uddhav ji is 40% sure that his election was stolen. My brother Tejashwi ji is 40% sure. Listen, 100% the elections are being stolen. Please remove doubt from your minds.

And also, please understand that it takes years and years to build a social media presence. It does not happen organically in a week. I have 10 million YouTube followers, but my account is fully suppressed. So, if you are under the impression that social media is fair and that the opposition is being supported by it, you are living in a different reality. The entire architecture — media, social media, the legal system, bureaucracy, intelligence agencies — is aligned to keep this government in power.

But this government will not survive because it has destroyed our democracy. It has destroyed the future of the Indian people. What is coming now, after what has happened in Iran, is uncontrollable. It is uncontrollable, and it is going to create a space for us to mobilise the masses.

Also, get rid of the notion that we are not coordinated and do not act together. These are all ideas the BJP is putting out. This is not true. I am 100% sure, and I can vouch right now for the DMK. When it comes to defending the idea of India, every single person will be in this room. We have our fights, but if you are asking me to go and hug the ex-Chief Minister of Kerala, I cannot, and I will not, because I have an ongoing political fight with him. So we have to be flexible, and we have to realise that there is a full-scale assault on us, trying to prove that the opposition is weak.

Finally, I find that in our discussions there is often a tinge of depression. People think: Oh my God, how will we ever beat the BJP? Let me tell you, it is easy to beat them if we stand together and resist.

In the last election, nobody — nobody in this room, except me — believed that we could beat the BJP. Now everybody in this room must start believing that we will defeat them. You start with that belief, and I guarantee you — state after state, election after election, whether they cheat or don’t cheat, they will fall.

Thank you very much.

[Courtesy: Indian National Congress portal, https://inc.in.]

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Rahul Gandhi’s Call for Resistance Echoes Gandhi’s Vision of Swaraj

S.N. Sahu

The speech by Lok Sabha leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi on June 8, delivered at the INDIA alliance meeting in Delhi flagged a profoundly seminal point that the Congress party represented a resistance movement in defence of the equality of all Indians. Unlike numerous political parties in India, he claimed the Congress “was never built using the infrastructure and protection of the Indian State”. According to him, the day Mahatma Gandhi set the goal for achieving independence of India from British rule, from that date the Congress transformed itself from a political formation to a resistance movement.

British rule was marked, among others, by the stifling of liberties of the people, devastation of their livelihood and the hostile character of the Indian state controlled by colonial rulers and employed against Indians and freedom fighters with no remedy available to address people’s grievances.

Rahul dispelled the notions of his alliance partners the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), etc. that the institutions enshrined in the Constitution would work. He did so by harping on the point that the Indian state under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had stopped providing a fair and playing field for the neutral functioning of those institutions.

“The BJP controls the institutions of the state. The BJP controls the legal system. The BJP controls the bureaucracy. The BJP controls the intelligence agencies. The BJP even controls the Election Commission,” he remarked with anguish.

At the same time, while emphatically noting that the Congress Party is a party of resistance, Rahul forcefully remarked that its functioning is not dependent on the neutrality of the Indian state. He continued to assert that “..the more the institutions of the Indian state are throttled, the more aggressively the Congress Party will fight to defend the Constitution.”

In the aforementioned utterances of Rahul, there are robust reflections of the vision of Mahatma Gandhi. Take his statement that BJP controls the legal system, which implies that getting justice in such a system controlled by the BJP, which operates the state apparatus, has become elusive.

A hundred and six years ago, on October 6, 1920 Mahatma Gandhi wrote an article, “Hallucination of Law Courts” in Young India and wrote in it with sadness : “The worst is that they (law courts) support the authority of a government. They are supposed to dispense justice and are therefore called the palladile of a nation’s liberty. But when they support the authority of an unrighteous Government they are no longer palladile of liberty, they are crushing houses to crush a nation’s spirit.”

So, when the nation’s spirit is crushed in 2026 because the BJP is controlling the legal system, Rahul is justly upholding the cause of resistance in which Gandhi’s vision is getting amplified.

Rahul cited the BJP’s control over the Election Commission and he made the remark that there is now no possibility of conducting free and fair elections in India. “And so we have to go into a mode of resistance,” he said.

It is indeed of extraordinary significance that what Rahul said in 2026 was stated by Mahatma Gandhi on May 9, 1919 while delivering a speech on the Khilafat movement: “If we had the franchise and responsible government, we could by our vote turn that government out of power.” He then asked, “ But in the absence of any such effective methods of making our will felt, what are we to do?” He said that when the government did not respond to the problems of the people, an agitation was launched and when it did not succeed they resorted to violence which Gandhi described as barbarous.

Therefore, he prescribed the path of resistance which he called Satyagraha by shunning violence and based on self – restraint and love.

Those words uttered in 1919 were reflected in Rahul Gandhi’s statement that the more the institutions of Indian state are throttled by Modi regime the more vigorously the Congress would fight based on the ideals of satya, ahimsa and compassion.

Mahatma Gandhi in his speech at Bezwada on August 23, 1920 described the British regime as “ autocracy doubly distilled, appearing in the guise of democracy…”

Those words are playing out in the context of Modi regime’s policies converting India to an elected autocracy because, in the words of Rahul, the BJP has captured all institutions of the State.

Rahul cited the multiple crises manifested, among others, in NEET exam paper leaks, faulty evaluation of lakhs of answer sheets of 12th class students who wrote their exams and the destruction of the ecology of Nicobar island and saw hope in resistance to those crises to save India. His own Bharat Jodo Yatra was a form of resistance demonstrating what Gandhi called “unbending bravery.”

In fact, the abiding relevance of Rahul’s idea of resistance in the wake of the BJP capturing the institutions of the state and mounting anger of people flow from Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of Swaraj, one aspect of which is anchored in resistance.

Gandhi wrote on January 29, 1925 that “real Swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when it is abused. In other words, Swaraj is to be obtained by education of the masses to a sense of their capacity to regulate and control authority.”

[S.N. Sahu served as an officer on special duty to former President K.R. Narayanan. Courtesy: The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire. The Wire is an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu.]