We Can Always Give Second Name To Our Coalition INDIA But..: Rahul Gandhi on Bharat Name Controversy

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Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has hit out at the BJP during an interaction with students and academics in Paris, saying that the governing party is out to get power at any cost.

When asked about the debate around the name of the country, Gandhi noted that both India and Bharat are documented in the Constitution and therefore, the government was acting in “strange ways” because they are “irritated” with the name of the Opposition’s Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.).

“There is something deeper that is going on, which is that people who want to change the name of anything are basically trying to deny history. The fact of the matter is, whether we like it or we don’t like it, we have a history. We were ruled by the British, we fought the British, we defeated the British… English is spoken by more Indians than English people; it’s our own language more than theirs,” he said.

“Well… the Constitution actually uses both names, right? The line in the Constitution, which I began with, is ‘India, that is, Bharat, shall be a Union of States’. So I don’t really see a problem… both are perfectly acceptable,” Rahul Gandhi said in the video which was posted on social media platform X.

-“But, I think, maybe we irritated the government a little because we named our coalition INDIA and that got them all heated up. And now they’ve decided to change the name of the country,” Rahul Gandhi further said in the video.

“Embedded in that English is a huge history, lot of pain, lot of happiness, imagination, struggle, those things are embedded. And the people who want to change the name want to erase that; they don’t want the history of our country is known to our future generations, it disturbs them,” he said.

The former Congress president also countered the notion that the majority of India voted for the current government, claiming that 60 per cent of India voted for the current Opposition alliance.

“So, this idea that the majority community is voting for the BJP, is a wrong idea. The majority community actually votes more for us than they vote for them. They do polarise society, they divide society, they spread hatred in society and that is their mechanism. They also happen to have very good relationships with the most powerful, richest crony capitalists in the land, who finance and support them,” said Gandhi.

On the issue of crony capitalism, the Congress leader once again targeted the Adani Group to claim that “documentation is available” to back the Opposition’s allegations of monopolistic practices.

“What you’re having in India today with Mr Adani is so blatant and it’s completely so over the top, I don’t think there’s any other place where this is going on. The gentleman is in pretty much every single business… eventually he’s going to be held accountable for it,” he said.