Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday took a dig at Narendra Modi for the prime minister’s comment that the world got to know about Mahatma Gandhi after the 1982 film ‘Gandhi’.

“Only a student of Entire Political Science would have felt the need to see a film to know about Mahatma Gandhi,” Rahul wrote in Hindi on his X (formerly Twitter) handle on Tuesday.

In an interview with the ABP channels aired on Tuesday, Modi, without naming the Congress, had accused the party of not projecting the Mahatma to global glory.

“Mahatma Gandhi was a great soul,” Modi said. “Wasn’t it our responsibility to get him that level of global recognition during the last 75 years? Nobody knew about him. When the ‘Gandhi’ film was released, curiosity was generated across the world about who is this man. We didn’t do anything. If the world knew about Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi was no less than them and you have to accept that.”

The film ‘Gandhi’, an India-UK co-production directed by Richard Attenborough, had received 11 Oscar nominations, winning eight awards including best film in the same year that Steven Spielberg’s film ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ was in contention.

‘Gandhi’ was released in India on November 30, 1982, and in the following weeks in the UK and US.

“I don’t know in which world the outgoing Prime Minister lives where Mahatma Gandhi was unknown across the world before 1982,” Congress leader Jairam Ramesh wrote on X. “If anyone has destroyed the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, it is the outgoing PM himself. It is his government which destroyed the Gandhian institutions in Varanasi, Delhi and Ahmedabad.”

Ramesh said the ongoing Lok Sabha election was a tussle between the followers of the Mahatma and those of his assassin, Nathuram Godse.

“This is the hallmark of RSS. They do not understand Mahatma Gandhi’s nationalism. The atmosphere that their ideology created led to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse,” Ramesh wrote.

Evidently to ridicule Modi, the Congress’s Kerala unit shared pictures of Gandhi visiting London, Switzerland and Paris in the 1930s.

Several other users referred to the public acknowledgment made by both King Jr and Mandela of Gandhi’s contribution to the movements these two leaders led against racial discrimination in the United States and against apartheid in South Africa respectively.

The front pages of international newspapers from the day after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 were also shared widely.