Congress president Rahul Gandhi said certain “hateful remarks” made against him by Prime Minister Narendra Modi prompted him to hug him during the no-confidence debate in Parliament, and noted that “he [Mr. Modi] didn’t like [it] and was upset by it”, adding that “some of his party members also didn’t approve of it”.
Mr. Gandhi said non-violence was a foundational philosophy of the nationhood and the entire history. “Hate could not be countered with hate, and one can fight violence only by non-violence”.
“That’s the essesnce of being Indian. The basic idea is this that if someone hates you, that is something that they are doing. Hate is their internal emotion, it is their reaction to the world. Responding to their hate with hate is quite foolish. It is not going to solve any problem,” Mr. Gandhi told a gathering at Bucerius Summer School in Hamburg.
He said:
“You are in full control of how you respond to things. So, when the Prime Minister was making sort of hateful remarks at me, I was feeling that I needed to go and give him a hug an tell him that world is not such a bad place and it is not all evil out there.
“And that there are many people who actually have a lot of affection and I gave him a hug. He didn’t like that..he didn’t like that because... Gandhiji actually wrote it... he said the only way you can counter hate is through love.
“You can’t counter hate with hate because it just increases the hate. When I actually went and showed affection to the prime minister, he was taken aback, he was upset by it. But it works, it really does.”
Asked if it came as a surprise for his party members, Mr. Gandhi said: “Yeah they were a bit..some of them didn’t like it. Some of them told me later that you should not have hugged him... But I disagreed. I said no... I think the conversation, not only in India, the conversation in the whole world somehow people think that by hating other people you will get a solution.”
Mr. Gandhi said:
“I have seen it in my own life, that you simply won’t get a solution. The only solution is through conversation, the only solution eventually is by talking to people and showing them that you understand where they are coming from.
“There is no other way. You might be under the illusion that you can fight violence with violence, but it will come back. You might think that you are very powerful and that you can subdue somebody else, but they will find a way of coming back.”
