Rahul Gandhi on Friday reiterated the accusation against Prime Minister Narendra Modi of “surrendering” to the diktats of the US by abruptly ending hostilities with Pakistan.
Rahul’s remark at a Congress meeting in Bihar’s Rajgir came a day after US President Donald Trump repeated for the eleventh time that he had used tariffs and trade deals as tools to force India and Pakistan to call off the confrontation.
India has maintained that the issue was resolved bilaterally, in line with India’s policy against third-party intervention on Kashmir.
“Trump sahab has said 11 times… that I made Narendra Modi surrender. Eleven times in public. Narendra Modi ji is not able to even whimper. Narendra Modi ji is unable to say that Trump is lying, because it is the truth. I knew that the day we put a little pressure, he would surrender (to agreeing to a caste census which he previously opposed),” Rahul said, claiming credit for the Centre’s decision to conduct a caste census, a demand that had been doggedly pursued by the Opposition.
Last night, Trump repeated his claim of brokering peace in South Asia at a media interaction at the Oval Office.
“I said... we’re dealing with you on trade, Pakistan and India. We’re not going to deal with you on trade if you go shooting each other and whipping out nuclear weapons that maybe even affect us... I said if you’re going to do that, we’re not going to do any trade deals. And you know what, I got that war stopped,” Trump said.
An aide to Vladimir Putin has confirmed that Trump repeated the claim to the Russian President during a telephone conversation on Wednesday after Ukraine inflicted major drone strikes on Russia.
In his speech, Rahul reiterated how Telangana’s caste census was better than Bihar’s and was framed with inputs from the civil society. He also trained guns on crony capitalism.
“You would have heard the names Ambani-Adani. Ports, airports, whatever they want, how much land they want. They are trying to take Dharavi (the slum in Mumbai)…. Lakhs of crores worth of land. All they have is their friendship with Narendra Modi,” he said.
The Adani group is “redeveloping” the mega slum with the Maharashtra government, which is expected to cost around ₹3 lakh crore. The first phase may be launched as early as the end of this year.