Patna: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday asserted that his party was “learning from its mistakes in Bihar” where the party had been lax in bringing about all-round development through empowerment of the downtrodden.
The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha was addressing a symposium in the state capital, months ahead of the crucial Assembly polls in which the Congress, in alliance with RJD and the Left, will take on the formidable ruling NDA.
While addressing the “Samvidhan Suraksha Sammelan” (Save the Constitution Symposium), Gandhi claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had built a “system” in which the country is being run by five per cent of the population and 10-15 people are controlling the entire corporate world.
“I must be the first person in the Congress to admit that we did not work, in Bihar, with the zeal we should have. But we shall move forward learning from our mistakes. Our party, and the coalition of which we are a part, shall strive for uplift of SCs, STs, OBCs, extremely backward classes and minorities,” said the Congress leader, whose party’s decline in the state began with the Mandal wave of the 1990s.
He said, “We recently did something which may not have been great but was still of significance. We reconstituted District Congress Committees. Earlier, two-thirds of these were headed by upper castes. Now two-thirds of these are headed by the deprived castes. This has been in line with clear instructions from (national president Mallikarjun) Kharge ji and me for the organization”.
Claiming that Bihar has been the land of great political changes, starting from the Independence struggle, Gandhi alleged that at present, the NDA’s politics is serving the interests of billionaires. “We are sure that Bihar will once again serve as a catalyst for change,” he said.
The Congress leader, who was on his third tour of the state in four months, had earlier visited Begusarai, about 150 km away, to take part in “palayan roko, naukri do (stop migration, give jobs) pada-yatra”, an initiative of the party’s student and youth wings to highlight Bihar’s endemic problem of joblessness and migration.
Gandhi did not address the public in Begusarai, which is also the home state of the party’s youth wing national in charge Kanhaiya Kumar.