Rahul Gandhi was just about to leave the Grand Committee room in the House of Commons on Monday after an hour-long session with a group of about a dozen mostly Labour MPs when he paused to deliver the final message.
It is something he has said before but it was a point he clearly wanted to emphasise as he was talking directly to British politicians for the first time and it came on the final day of his weeklong tour of the UK.
“India is a democracy three times the size of the US and three times the size of Europe,” he said. “If democracy is weakened in India, democracy will be weakened everywhere on the planet.”
Apart from members of the House of Commons and the Lords, there were also local government representatives and academics, who had all been invited by Virendra Sharma, the Labour MP for Ealing South and chairman of the Indo-British All Party Parliamentary Group.
He had organised a community meeting for Rahul on Sunday in west London. “It was in the biggest community hall and more than a thousand people came,” said Sharma. “Another 300 people had to be turned away.” A question for Rahul came from Rajesh Agrawal, the Labour deputy mayor of London for Business.
Agrawal wanted to know about the kind of links Rahul wanted with the Indian diaspora, which numbers about 2.5m in the UK taking into account those born in the country of parents who had come from either India or East Africa.
“Can I ask you a counter question?” reacted Rahul. “What makes you Indian?”
Agrawal said that as far as he was concerned, Indian values could be summed up in the Sanskrit saying, “Vasudhaivakutumbakam — the world is one family.”
Rahul was animated: “It is the central value of our civilisation. You are ambassadors for Indian values.” Rahul said Britain could help India by passing on some of its cutting-edge higher technology. But he allowed himself a little joke at Britain’s expense. The sound system in the committee room was not working, making some of the exchanges hard to hear.
Rahul quipped: “The light is out of order — they are functioning in India.” But it wasn’t the lights he was worried about in the Lok Sabha. He said Opposition MPs had been arrested outside Parliament where important debates had either been stifled or not taken place. Outside the committee room stood Big Ben, perhaps the symbol of the Mother of Parliaments.
Rahul pressed home his point: “MPs were arrested just for standing outside Parliament.” He also spoke about his Bharat Jodo Yatra and recalled the comment of a member of the public: “In this supermarket of hatred, you are opening a stall of love.” For that, he received a spontaneous round of applause from MPs. He told them that the “Congress is more than a party— it is to do with the idea of India. The freedom movement against the British was non-violent. Non-violence is deeply embedded in Indians. Now Indians are not allowed to speak.”