Rahul Gandhi has said “our fight is our fight”, adding that he has not been seeking support from anybody during his foreign trips.

“I am very clear, our fight is our fight. But there is a group of young students from India here. I want to have a relationship with them and want to talk to them. It’s my right to do it,” he said during an interaction with Indian students and academics of Indian origin at Stanford University in California.

Rahul, who is in the US on a three-city tour, made the remarks on Wednesday night in response to questions from Indian students on the Stanford University Campus.

“I don’t understand why the Prime Minister doesn’t come here and do it,” Rahul asked amid applause from the audience. Some of the students were denied entry as the auditorium was packed. The students started queuing up two hours before the event started.

The moderator said that the Prime Minister was welcome to come to Stanford anytime and interact with the students and academics. In the past one-and-a-half years, several Indian ministers have interacted with Indian students.

Rahul said he had not imagined that anything like his disqualification from the Lok Sabha was possible when he joined politics, but asserted that it had given him a “huge opportunity” to serve the people.

The Wayanad MP was disqualified from the Lok Sabha earlier this year after he was convicted by a Surat court in a 2019 criminal defamation case over his “Modi surname” remark.

At Stanford, Rahul said that when he joined politics in 2000, he had not imagined that he would have to go through this. What is going on now is way outside anything that he had thought was possible when he joined politics, he said.

“But then I think it’s actually given me a huge opportunity. Probably much bigger than the opportunity I would have. That’s just the way politics works,” he said.

“I think the drama started, really, about six months ago. We were struggling. The entire Opposition is struggling in India. Huge financial dominance. Institutional capture. We’re struggling to fight the democratic fight in our country,” he said, adding that at this point, he decided to go for the Bharat Jodo Yatra.

Rahul later tweeted that it was a pleasure to engage with the learned audience at Stanford on “The New Global Equilibrium”. “We discussed the challenges and opportunities of a changing world order. Actions based on truth is the way forward,” he tweeted.

Written with a PTI report