Rahul Gandhi, who is on a week-long tour of the UK, spoke at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School on the topic of “Learning to Listen in the 21st Century”.

He pressed home his message to some of the world’s brightest MBA students that “we need new thinking about how you produce in a democratic environment compared to a coercive environment”.

People around the world need to find a way of listening compassionately to new concerns in the 21st century that has been transformed by the shift of production away from democratic countries and towards China, said Rahul, who is a visiting fellow at the Judge Business School.

“The art of listening” when done consistently and diligently is “very powerful”, he argued in his lecture on Tuesday.

But he said the decline of manufacturing in democratic countries in recent decades, including in India and the US, as production shifted to China, has produced mass inequality and associated anger that needed urgent attention and dialogue.

“We simply cannot afford a planet that doesn’t produce under democratic systems,” he told the MBA students. “So we need new thinking about how you produce in a democratic environment compared to a coercive environment,” and a “negotiation about this”.

His lecture was divided into three parts. First, he gave an outline of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, a 4,081km walk that led him through 14 Indian states from September 2022 to January 2023 to “draw attention to prejudice, unemployment and growing inequality in India”.

Second, he took a look at the “two divergent perspectives” of the US and China since World War II and especially since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. He said that in addition to shedding manufacturing jobs, the US had become less open after September 11, 2001, while China “idolises harmony” through organisation around the Chinese Communist Party.

Third, under “imperative for a global conversation” he knitted the themes together in a call for a new type of receptiveness to various viewpoints — explaining that a yatra is a journey or pilgrimage in which people “shut themselves down so they can listen to others”.

Rahul, his beard neatly trimmed, was introduced to the MBA audience by Kamal Munir, Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Cambridge and professor of Strategy & Policy at the Judge Business School, who said the speaker comes from a “long lineage of global leaders”.

Rahul also has a Cambridge connection -- he did an MPhil for a year at Trinity from 1994-95.

In a statement, the Judge Business School said “the Cambridge MBA programme is for globally minded, successful individuals who want to understand the complexities of business and society, so Cambridge Judge Business School thanks Mr Gandhi for sharing his experience and insight on global economics and policy-making”.