Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday said that he does not hate Prime Minister Narendra Modi. While interacting with students and faculty at Georgetown University in Washington DC, the Congress MP said that the Prime Minister has a point of view and he does not agree with it. 

“I don’t hate Mr. Modi. He has a point of view; I don’t agree with the point of view, but I don’t hate him. He has a different perspective, and I have a different perspective,” Gandhi said.

The senior Congress leader, who is on a three-day visit to the United States, asserted that during the Lok Sabha elections the entire campaign was structured in a way that PM Modi could do his thing across the country. During the interaction, he also claimed that the Election Commission was doing what the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and PM Modi wanted. Dubbing the Lok Sabha polls “controlled elections,” the Congress MP said that if the elections were free and fair, the BJP would not have been near 246 seats. 

“Before elections, we kept stressing on the idea that institutions have been captured…We don’t have a fair playing field…The education system is captured by RSS. Media and investigative agencies are captured. We kept saying it, but people were not getting it… I started holding up the Constitution, and everything that I had said suddenly just exploded… Poor India, oppressed India that India understood that if the Constitution goes, the whole game is gone… Poor people deeply understood that this was a fight between those who were protecting the Constitution and those who wanted to destroy it… The caste census issue also became big…These things suddenly started coming together,” Rahul Gandhi said.

“I don’t think that in a fair election, the BJP were near 246. They had a huge financial advantage. They had locked our bank accounts…The Election Commission was doing what they wanted. The entire campaign was structured so Narendra Modi could do his thing across the country. States where they were weak were designed differently than states where they were strong. I don’t view it as a free election. I view it as a controlled election,” he further stated.

Earlier, Gandhi addressed an Indian diaspora event in Virginia’s Herndon. He will be in Washington for two days before heading back to Delhi.