 Thank you very much for inviting me here this evening. It's an honor for me to come. As you mentioned, I was an alumnus of the Busseria School. I spent a very nice time here in Hamburg. We learned quite a lot and had a lot of fun. So those were good days and I'm happy to come back. I'm here to tell you a little bit about what is going on in my country and how that is relevant to the rest of the world. So I'd like to start around 70 years ago when India was locked up in hundreds of thousands of villages. India was a rural country. People lived in a caste society, rigid rules. They aspired, but it was very difficult to move outside the village. For some of you who haven't been to an Indian village, I can give you a little bit of a description. Most Indian villages are divided along caste lines. If you're a lower caste person, if you were a lower caste person, for example, 70 years ago, you couldn't drink water from the village well. In certain spaces, certain villages, if your shadow fell on an upper caste person, the upper caste person would go and have a bath. And for all practical purposes, if you were from a lower caste or a backward caste, you pretty much had no mobility in the village. Forget about the country. 70 years ago, something beautiful happened in my country. We got independence and we started a journey, a transition from a rural India to an urban India, a transition of imagination, a transition in the way India viewed itself, a transition in vision. An India which had not been moving for a long time, had been static, had been isolated, started to wake up. And a transition began, began slowly, and then it picked up speed. And the transition was essentially Indian people breaking the ideas of caste, breaking the ideas of a lack of mobility and starting to move. And it was enabled by the idea of one man, one vote enshrined in our constitution. Similar transformation was taking place nearby. Hundreds of millions of people in India, hundreds of millions of people in China, changing their way of being, changing their existence. The idea was the same. Urbanization, modernity, but the method and the way they did it was completely different. China did it in a centralized way, reasonable amount of violence, managed by the Communist Party, managed by the People Liberation Army, and India did it organically in a decentralized way. Anybody could do anything they want, anybody could move wherever they wanted. China, the Communist Party decided where you would go. But the end result was a massive transformation of hundreds of millions of people, never seen before, never ever in human history have so many people changed their way of living, changed their view of the world, changed their vision. And there were a couple of things that were the foundation of this transformation in India. One idea was that if India was going to go through this risky transition, difficult transition, dangerous transition, everybody should be included in it. India should not transform itself for few people. India should not transform itself for just one community or one group of people. India should transform itself for every single Indian. Every single Indian should be able to aspire. Many languages spoke into my country. Many, many different states, different cultures, different ideas. We wanted all of them to be included in this sort of awakening, in this transformation. The second idea was that this transformation would mean different levels of risk for different people. So poor people would face a higher risk in this transformation. They would have to make a much bigger change. They would have to move from a village to a city. The risks were much bigger. Certain communities, certain groups of people would struggle. Certain groups of people would require a cushion, maybe some help. Dalit communities, lower caste communities, tribal communities, minorities. So the idea was that as we transformed the government should support its people, should help its people smoothen this traumatic transition, this traumatic change. So the government, pretty much all governments, until the last one, this one, 2014, Narendra Modi government, followed these two ideas very, very strongly. So for example, poor country like India guarantees 100 days of work to all its poor people. It's called the guaranteed employment scheme. You can be anybody, any religion, you can speak any language. If you live in India, you're a poor person, you get 100 days of guaranteed employment. Right to food. Every single Indian person has the right to food. The state helps give them food, doesn't allow them to go hungry. The right to information. Doesn't depend on your religion. Any Indian person can ask their government about what is going on. And I can take you back a few years, bank nationalization, designed to give credit to many more people. So these were two of the fundamental ideas that pretty much every single Indian government held true, which has now been attacked and to a great extent damaged by the government in power today. They do not feel that every single person in India should have access to the fruits of this transformation. They feel that tribal communities, poor farmers, Dalit communities, lower caste people, minorities should not get the same benefits that the elite of the country get. And our point is that the risk was everybody's. Everybody took the risk and we feel everybody should get the reward. The other thing they've done is they've started attacking the support structures that were designed to help certain groups of people. Very recently a law that protected the Dalit community from violence was scratched down. The right to food was weakened. The right to guaranteed employment weakened. And all the money that used to go into these schemes is now going into the hands of very few people, the largest corporates in the country. But that's not the only damage they've done. There's something much more significant and dangerous that the government has done. This transition that took place, took place on an informal economy, took place on the back of millions of small and medium businesses that allowed people from the villages to come to the cities, to do a job for a couple months and then go back to the village. They acted like a shock absorber. A couple years back, the Prime Minister demonetized the Indian economy. He basically said that 1,000 and 500 rupee notes would be worthless. And he destroyed the cash flows of all these small and medium businesses. Millions and millions and millions of people who worked in the informal sector were left unemployed. I want to give you a sense of the scale of this. China produces 50,000 new jobs every 24 hours. In the same amount of time, in the same 24 hours, India, a country that is approximately the same size as China, produces only 450. And they didn't stop at demonetization. They imposed a badly conceptualized, badly thought through, implemented goods and services tax, which complicated the lives of these small and medium businesses and basically resulted in the closure of hundreds of thousands of them. And large numbers of people who worked in these businesses were forced back to the villages. And these three things that the government has done is made India angry. And that's what you get to read in the newspapers. When you hear about lynchings in India, when you hear about attacks on Dalits in India, when you hear about attacks on minorities in India, that's the reason for it. That a huge, powerful transformation, which is frankly shaping the entire world, requires certain protections for its people. And that protection is being taken away. And India is reacting to that. It's very dangerous in the 21st century to exclude people. And I want to give you a small example, a strong example, but a small, strong example. The United States attacked Iraq in 2003. And one of the first things they did was Executive Order 1 and Executive Order 2, which is in common parlance called debatification. But in fact, it was a law that stopped a particular tribe in Iraq from getting government jobs, a law that stopped them from getting jobs in the army. And there was a history to it. So it seemed like a very innocuous decision at the time. It took the United States a couple months to defeat Saddam Hussein's army. Hardly any Americans died. Very limited number of soldiers died. A few months after the invasion, the network that was excluded from jobs in Iraq, the Tikriti tribal network, linked up with the cell phone network in Iraq and with the network of artillery shells that were left in the villages. And you got an insurgency that fought the United States and caused massive casualties to the Americans. And in and there, that insurgency slowly entered empty spaces. It entered the empty space in Iraq. It entered the empty space in Syria. And then it connected with the global internet to form the horrific idea called ISIS. And I'm explaining this because if you don't give people a vision in the 21st century, somebody else will give them one. And that is the real risk of excluding large numbers of people from our development processes. Every country faces this risk. If you don't embrace people, if you don't give people a vision, somebody else is going to do it. And that vision might not be a vision that is good for you or good for the world. I want to end by telling you about a conversation I had many years ago with the ex-Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, which has stayed in my mind. He had come to India and I asked him, what was your experience in the Vietnam War? What was your takeaway from the Vietnam War? And he said to me, you know Rahul, during the war we used to talk to the Vietnamese. I used to talk to the Vietnamese generals. And we spent a lot of time talking to them. But we never listened to each other. It was only after the war when I met those same generals that I realized that what they were telling us was not what we were hearing. And what we were telling them was not what they were hearing. And he said that I wish that we had listened to them during the war. We would have saved many, many lives. And I think that's what is important in the 21st century. You can disagree with somebody. But in a connected world, you have to listen to what they're saying, where they're coming from. As I said recently, hate is a choice. I can fight you. I can take you on. I can compete with you. But hating you is something that I actively have to choose to do. And I think hate is a dangerous thing in a connected world. So what we do in India and the Congress Party, we work with our people. We bring them together. We try and carry as many of them as possible in this transition. And we find that when you actually go and listen to people, and they might be very different than you, they might have a different cultural background than you, they might speak a different language. But when you actually start listening to people and try to understand where they're coming from, you can get a hell of a lot done. So I'd like to end my talk by telling you that I think there is a lot of hatred in the world today, but there is not enough listening. And I think listening is something that is very, very powerful. So thank you for coming here.