Voices of people are suppressed, says Rahul Gandhi about social media | India News – Times of India

NEW DELHI: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday said the tragedy of politics today was that the voice of the people was being suppressed. He recalled the manner in which his father and former prime minister late Rajiv Gandhi used to interact with the masses and lamented that the connect with politicians and leaders was missing these days.
The Congress leader, in a Youtube video titled ‘Voices of India’ and recorded at Shri Rajiv Gandhi Photo Exhibition organised by Indian Youth Congress (IYC) in the national capital, recalled his tours with his father.
He said, “What I remember of my tours with my father was, what was driving the tour was not just connecting with people. It was actually trying to understand their needs and it was about listening to what they were trying to tell him and I remember a lot of it was just going there and listening.”
He points out some pictures and says how Rajiv Gandhi was listening to the people. “Look, you see this picture here. He’s listening. This picture here. He’s listening. Right, so it was constantly listening and he would make these connections – he would be in this crowd listen and then suddenly he would say okay this can be transformed with this instrument.”
Rahul Gandhi said his after his journey, his father would go and look around to find instruments that could transform the voice of this nation. “There is this tremendous voice here, but it’s struggling to speak. Of course, that’s been magnified today, it’s not being allowed to speak, and it’s being crushed with monopoly capital is being crushed with, you know media it’s been crushed with an authoritarian system.”
Rahul Gandhi called the voice as “God”. “There’s nothing more than this voice. It’s not a singular voice. It’s millions and millions of voices that speak together have huge power when they speak and a tremendous amount of nuance… So, the tragedy of politics of today is that, in a world of media, in a world of WhatsApp, in a world of Twitter, in a world of Facebook, that voice is basically suppressed.”

On Thursday too, Rahul Gandhi had posted a video on YouTube in which, while comparing a pilot with a leader, said that the former gets into the finer details of something and then looks at the big picture and this is how it trains a person for life as a leader.
The video clip, titled ‘The Joy of Flight’, had photographs of Rajiv Gandhi in the role of a pilot. Asked how being a pilot trains one for life as a leader, Rahul, who also is a trained pilot, said, “You know pilots have a very particular ability that comes from their training and it is this idea, that you have to move, from a 30,000 feet vision to details in the cockpit. If you lose track of details in the cockpit, you run into trouble. And if you lose track of the 30,000 feet picture you run into trouble.”
He said, “So a pilot, and I am one, we move from these two spaces very seamlessly and very quickly. Pilots also when they fly, their imagination isn’t blocked by roads, by railway lines. Their imagination is at 30,000 feet, so they have this ability to see large systems. And this is what really helped my father.”
Rahul said Rajiv Gandhi could see this process taking place where he would go and meet people, get into their details, understand their details and then instantly move to 30,000 to 40,000 and 50,000 feet and look at the big picture. “His (Rajiv Gandhi’s) work was constantly moving between these two perspectives and always understanding that imagination can bridge anything so that to me was a very powerful thing that my father had,” he said.