In a rare interview with the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi opened up on his experience during the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’, spoke of how Prime Minister Narendra Modi could be beaten in the next election, remembered fond memories with grandmother Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv Gandhi and answered why he was still single at 52.

Sharing the learnings that the Congress leader attained post-completion of the yatra, Gandhi claimed that the journey was more like a ‘Tapasya’ (sacrifice).

, “… everyone’s limits, myself included, are far beyond what we think. In Sanskrit, the oldest language in the world, there is a word, Tapasya , which is difficult for a Western mind to understand. Someone translates it with ‘sacrifice’, ‘patience’, but the meaning is different: to generate heat. The march is an action that generates warmth, makes you look inside yourself, makes you understand the extraordinary resilience of the Indians,” Gandhi said.

Asked if polarisation between Hindus and Muslims existed, Gandhi acknowledged the fact but stressed that the situations were not as dire as portrayed by the media under the aegis of the government and was more of a tool to distract people from more harrowing real issues like “poverty, illiteracy, inflation, the post-covid crisis of small, indebted entrepreneurs and landless farmers”.