Congress vice-president, Rahul Gandhi, on Wednesday called on NRIs to join hands with the old party in New York.
Addressing a gathering at Times Square, Gandhi said, “You (NRIs) have tremendous knowledge and understanding so you need to involve. I want to invite you to work with Congress to discuss a vision for going forward. We want to take your help.”
The Congress scion asserted that NRIs are “our backbone,” the Congress vice president averred, “everywhere you look, there is an Indian working for US and India, building both countries.”
He further stated that great leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were all NRIs.
“The original Congress movement was an NRI movement. Mahatma Gandhi was an NRI, Jawaharlal Nehru came back from England. Ambedkar, Azad, Patel these were all NRIs. Every single one of them went to the outside world, saw the outside world, returned back to India and used some of the ideas that they had got and transformed India,” Rahul said.
“Congress Party is 130 years old, but we don’t represent an organisation, we represent a philosophy of more than 1000 years old. People view India as a geographical construct, I view India as a set of ideas. We have many religions, languages and everyone is living happily together. The reasons they have been able to do so is due to ideas of the Congress party,” he added.
Watch: Congress VP Rahul Gandhi’s full address to the Indian National Overseas Congress in New York.
