Need new thinking to promote democratic environment: Rahul Gandhi at Cambridge

Former Congress president and MP Rahul Gandhi who is in the United Kingdom delivered a speech at Britain's prestigious Cambridge University on the 'art of listening'. Rahul Gandhi in his speech, has called for new thinking to promote a democratic environment in the world that should not be imposed.

“The art of listening” when done consistently and diligently is “very powerful,” said Rahul Gandhi who is also an alumnus of the University of Cambridge. Rahul Gandhi said this during a lecture entitled ‘Learning to Listen in the 21st Century.’

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

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

Rahul Gandhi’s lecture was divided into 3 parts which included an outline of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, a 4,081 km walk he led through 14 Indian states from September 2022 to January 2023 to draw attention to prejudice, unemployment and growing inequality in India

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. Rahul Gandhi said that in addition to shedding manufacturing jobs the US had become less open after 11 September 2001, while China “idolises harmony” through organisation around the Chinese Communist Party.

“Imperative for a Global Conversation” in which 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.

Cambridge JBS said Gandhi’s lecture to the MBA students revolved around the importance of people around the world finding a way of listening compassionately to new concerns in the 21st century, which has been transformed by the shift of production away from democratic countries. The "art of listening", when done consistently and diligently, is "very powerful," he said.

Gandhi is on a week-long tour of the UK and is scheduled to hold some closed-door sessions on Big Data and Democracy and India-China relations at Cambridge University. Later in the week, he will interact with representatives of the Indian Overseas Congress (IOC) UK chapter and also address an "Indian Diaspora Conference" planned over the weekend in London.