 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Good evening. Welcome here tonight at the International Summer Festival at Kampnagel in Hamburg, Germany. This is the third and final week of the International Summer Festival. And this festival is all about providing a platform for new artistic approaches in the performing arts. This year, for example, we had a wonderful production by an artist from Singapore, Ho Tsung Nien, on Southeast Asia. From Cuba came the Malpaso Dance Company, also with the world premiere on religious and pop-cultural dances. And if there's one thing in common that all our artists share, it's that they all take their subject from the present. And as a festival that is highly alert to the present and to the world around us, we always have a theoretical platform basis each year. This year, the theme was about the new discourse on homeland and nations. Subjects that I believe are also quite discussed in the country of our guest tonight, Raul Gandhi. We are very happy that we have this opportunity of presenting him. And this is thanks to Sascha Socke, who is standing next to me. Sascha is the director of the Buzzerius Summer School on Global Governance as part of the Sight Foundation. And this is actually a collaboration that has been going on for some years now. And I'm very happy that we have such a high-profile speaker tonight. Thank you, Sascha, for making this possible. And you will say something now about our guest of honor tonight. But I'm very happy to have you here, Mr. Gandhi. It's an honor for us. Thank you. Thank you, Andreas. Meine Damen und Herren, dear ladies and gentlemen, Excellencies, hello everyone, also on our video stream anywhere. So, as Andreas mentioned, this is part also not only of the International Summer Festival here at Camp Nagel, which is a great festival, but also part of this year's Buzzerius Summer School on Global Governance. And our speaker for tonight, he needs no introduction. You know him all. His name is Raul Gandhi. He is the president of the Indian National Congress. But if I might say so, he is also an alumnus of the Buzzerius Summer School on Global Governance. So you might ask yourself, what is this Buzzerius Summer School on Global Governance? It's a two-week seminar for young leaders. And Raul Gandhi participated in 2005. And among our participants from all over the world, we have several high-ranking politicians, CEOs, and other people. And we are now very glad, and I would like to welcome him now. Raul Gandhi. Raul Gandhi will first give a short speech, and then we will get into a conversation. And then we would like to bring in you, the audience, to ask some questions to him. 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 Buzzerius 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, or 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, 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 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 spoken in 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 is 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 of months, and then go back to the village. They acted like a shock absorber. A couple of 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, badly 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. 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. A 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. 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. Thank you so much. I think there will be lots of questions from the audience. But let me go first. Because your last example was very interesting talking about hate, because in these times we are talking a lot about hate speech and politics, especially when I follow you on Twitter. I see a lot of hate speech. I see it with every politician. Me doing the hate speech? No, not you doing, not you. The comments, the comments. Sorry, no. Just making sure. No, I think to listen to each other is very important, but there were times where there was no need to mention it. And also, I remember some weeks ago, there was a discussion in the Indian Parliament where were you making slightly the same point in the debate about that not only fighting against hate is important, but also love, and at the end of the debate, you went over to Prime Minister Modi and you hugged him. Yeah, because... And maybe you would like to comment on that. You see, non-violence in India is a foundational philosophy. It's a foundational philosophy of our nationhood. It's a foundational philosophy of our entire history. That's the essence of being Indian is to be non-violent. And the basic idea is this, that if someone hates you, that is something that they're doing. Hate is, it is their internal emotion, it is their reaction to the world. Responding to their hate with hate is quite foolish. It's not going to solve any problem. And you can, you're in full control of how you respond to things. The only thing really you control is 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 in, give him a hug, and tell him the 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 give him a hug. Thank you. Now. He didn't like that. He didn't like that because, no, Gandhi Ji actually wrote it. You see, he said that the only way you can counter hate is through love. You can't counter hate with hate because it just increases the hate. And 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. Also, it was quite unusual and a real surprise, and I also think a real surprise also to the members of your own party, wasn't it? Yeah, there were, but some of them didn't like it. Some of them told me later that, you know, you shouldn't have hugged them. But I disagreed. I said, no. I think the conversation, not only in India, the conversation in the whole world, but now people think that by hating other people, you'll get a solution. And I've seen 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're coming from. So then let's see how much love we will get from the questions of the audience. So as I mentioned, we have participants of this year's Butserio Summer School with us from 33 different countries from all over the world. But I would like to bring in not only participants, but also members of the audience as well. I would like to start with a member of our participants over there, Nura, please. Thank you so much for this. Am I allowed to walk up and down? Okay, but now I have to stand in honor of you. No, you can't see me. Thank you so much for this most inspiring talk. I think in the world we live in today, we need more people like you to spread the love and remind us of what is truly important. My question is very simple and a complicated one. You cannot fight hate with hate, but how do you fight violence? Because today we see many parts of the world where there is violence. How would you suggest that we fight that? The only way you can fight violence is with non-violence. There's no other way. It's the same. There's no other way. You might be under the illusion that you can fight violence with violence, but it'll come back. You might think that you're very powerful and that you can subdue somebody else, but believe me, they'll find a way of coming back because violence is being caused because of a certain anger inside. Until you remove the anger, until you understand and remove the anger, it's going to remain there. So you can't fight violence with more violence. And of course there are people out there who are so angry and so deeply infected by hatred that it'll take a huge effort. But I think that's the only way forward. That's the philosophy I believe in. Look, I've lost two members of my family. My grandmother and my father were both killed. So I've suffered violence. I'm talking actually from experience. I'm not talking without experience. And I can tell you that when you look at it properly, when you look at violence properly, there is only one way out of it. The only way you can move forward after violence is through forgiveness. There is no other way. And to forgive, you have to understand. You have to understand what exactly happened, why it happened. See, the common narrative is there is always someone at fault and someone who's not at fault. But if you go into the nuances, there are people at fault on both sides. And there are people trying to solve the problem on both sides. So it's working that. Look, you will see in the 21st century, you will see a certain amount of violence. It's a result of the connectivity. It's a result of limited resources. You will see it, and you will have to deal with it. But the way to deal with it is to actually listen, is to actually, at least from your side, act non-violently. And people think that this is weakness. A lot of people think that if I react non-violently to your violence, this is weakness. But in fact, this is strength. So the next one would be Melanie. And I can... It's okay. Thank you very much for your inspiring talk. I mean, you said you would also talk a little bit about India and the world, and you spoke about, like, the more domestic political issues. Can I interrupt you? Yes. I just want to put a last answer to that. Because it didn't... I needed to close that. See, my father was killed by a terrorist. Okay? He was killed in 1991. In 2009, I saw the person who killed my father lying in a field in Sri Lanka. Okay? And I called up my sister and I said to my sister, Priyanka, this is very strange. But I'm not happy. I should be celebrating that the person who's dead is the person who killed my father. But somehow I'm not happy. And she says, you know what? You're right. I'm not happy either. And the reason I wasn't happy was because I saw myself in his children. So I realized that him lying there actually means that there are kids like me who are crying. And he might have been a bad person. He might have been an evil person. Whatever you want to call it. But the violence that was done against him was impacting others like it had impacted me. So if you want to truly get into it, you have to understand the person who's being violent's perspective. You have to understand where that person is coming from. And if you go deep into it, you'll find that there is something that has triggered that violence. It's not just a random event. Some action, some violence done against him or her has triggered it. Sorry. Sorry about that. No, I have to apologize because I will change the subject now completely. Yeah, coming from a very personal experience. Even though it's not so personal, I would say. To a more global question. I mean in the past two weeks we spoke a lot about the future of the liberal world order and who are the allies on a global level. And I mean you've also attended Buzzerius Summer School, so I mean I think you're very well aware of what we could have debated about. I have the notebook. I still have it on. So where do you see India's role in the future when it comes to international relations? I mean it's part of the BRICS countries and at the same time part of the IBSA countries like the more democratic emerging markets. And I'm not so sure about which role India is going to play in the future and I mean from your party perspective what role would you want India to play in the future? I think there are a couple of potential visions out there. There is a American vision. There is a European vision. There is a Chinese vision. There is an Indian vision. There is a Islamic State vision. I mean there are a bunch of visions that are competing. India has a relationship, strategic relationship with the United States and India has a very deep, deep set of ideas that we share with them. Democracy, freedom, etc. But India cannot ignore the fact that China is growing extremely fast and is going to shape the planet. So to me India's role is actually to balance these two forces, much like Europe's. I think what would be the worst thing that could happen is that the Chinese and the United States get into a conflict. And I think that would be the absolute worst for the entire planet. And I think the Europeans and the Indians because of our design are very well positioned to make sure that that conflict doesn't happen. From an Indian perspective there are certain values like non-violence, like compassion, like listening that are going to become increasingly more important in the 21st century. You could get away in the 20th century by not listening to people by using massive amounts of force against people. You can't do it in the 21st century because they will find a way to get back to you. So I think there are certain values that India brings to the table that are unique and I think a lot of them were espoused by Mahatma Gandhi. They spread to South Africa. Mr. Mandela with Mr. King, Martin Luther King. So there is a very strong set of ideas that India brings to the table. But I think India's role and Europe's role would be one of balancing the narrative. You mentioned the U.S. So I would like to bring in a voice from the U.S. David. Thank you. I just want to follow up on that question and maybe press you a little bit on your answer to the last question because in America there's been a big shift in talking about the Asia Pacific to now the Indo-Asia Pacific. And clearly the wager that the Trump administration is making and that people in security circles in America are making is that India is willing, able, and prepared to play a larger role in working with the U.S. in Asia. But it sounds to me based on your last answer that India views itself as more of an honest broker or a balancer between the United States and China. So is India going to go between the two or is it willing to play a more active role with the United States, Australia, Japan, and others to uphold the liberal order in Asia? I mean, frankly, India's going to do what's in its self-interest, okay? But India has a relationship with the United States and India shares a certain set of values with the United States. So yes, we are closer to the United States than we are to the Chinese. But the Chinese and the United States are both major players on the planet. And India, frankly, sees itself as similar. I mean, we actually, to be blunt with you, someone asked an Indian leader, do you lean left or do you lean right? And she responded, no, we stand straight. So I think that's really the answer. What is in India's interest is what India will do. But we have a very good friendship with the United States. I think we have time for three or four more questions. I would like to take somebody from the back. First from the back and then there, yeah? So please, I think the very last row, you. Yes. And if you could shortly introduce yourself, who you are. My name is Deepak Kapoor. I'm from India. I'm a Punjabi living in Hamburg for the last six years, managing European operations of an Indian multinational here. There is so much talk about hugs. And I would like to experience one to feel it. Sorry, would you like to experience? One to feel it. I would like to experience one to feel it. Oh, okay. There's no problem. Now or later? The opposition guys in parliament, they are very careful of me now. So that was... Sure, you come ahead. Perfect. Thank you. I have no issue. If it makes you happy, it makes me happy. I promise to bring in you. So, over here. And if you could also introduce yourself. Okay, German, English. My name is Luba and I'm from Aldova, but here I am right my PhD. My math thesis was about advertising in India. Now it's about advertising in India. And I have also advertising here. And it's a big pleasure to see you live because I wrote also about you and your family. Okay, I have also to apologize because I would like also to switch the topic. And, you know, as you know, nowadays we have a big discussion about refugees from Syria, Iraq, in Germany, and also in Europe. And maybe you have some kind of piece of advice for German politicians, for opinion politicians, what have they do to make the situation much better, to help people and also not, because Germans, some groups of Germans are very, I would say, not happy because of this politics. And if we talk about hate and life, maybe you have some piece of advice. And maybe you can say what would you do if you were, for example, the Chancellor of Germany? Well, that's, I mean, I'm nobody to advise, frankly, the Chancellor of Germany or the German people on how to deal with their problems. But I can make one or two observations. If you look at Western Europe, you look at the United States, and you look at India, and you analyze why a certain style of leadership is coming. Mr. Modi in my country, others, I won't name them, but others on the planet, the reason is that whether it is India or Europe or the United States, we are unable to give jobs to our blue collar, the sort of non-white collar person in our countries. And so there is a, frankly, a failure in job creation. Put bluntly, we're being outcompeted by the Chinese. And that is creating a lot of anger in society. If you want, you create, when you get a situation of scarcity, you start to get conflict in society. And to me, a lot of the conflict that is taking place in India and a lot of the conflict that is taking place in Europe and the United States is because people here are concerned that the vision that brought them to this point is not going to take them over the next 10, 15, 20 years. And we have a lot of talk about services in India. We talk about 9% growth, 8% growth, but when you actually look at the numbers, they're no jobs. And that's a huge part of why this type of sentiment starts to develop. The other thing, frankly, is the West needs to think about the results of policies like Iraq and Syria. It needs to be careful when it goes in without understanding the consequences, without understanding the dynamics, the tribal dynamics, without understanding the societal dynamics in these societies. They might seem like weak countries, but every single country has a tremendous amount of power in it. And you disorganize that power, you upturn it. It is going to have consequences. So I think providing a vision to Europe, which is not an easy thing to do, and frankly I can't do it, providing a vision to India going forward, and India is developing that vision. We are beginning to understand how we move through this dangerous time. But the stuff that worked five years ago, I mean I've experienced it, the stuff that worked in 2004 didn't work in 2014, it just stopped. And frankly a lot of the conversation that takes place is about outmoded ideas. Ideas that are not actually going to work in the 21st century. I ask when I meet leaders of European countries, I ask them a simple question. I say to them, look, you are saying to me that you're pro-globalization. I can see that globalization benefits India. I can see it quite clearly. You just please answer me this question. How are you going to, with your cost structure, how are you going to compete at the blue collar level with the Chinese and the Indians? I've never got an answer. And so there is tremendous energy in Europe. There is tremendous ability in Europe. But it requires a vision that utilizes that energy. It requires a vision that brings people together and says, okay, we've got a problem. And this is my main complaint with the Prime Minister in India. India has a job problem. But the Prime Minister refuses to say it. And if you don't accept it and you don't say it, you aren't fixing it. First of all, I apologize in advance. I think half of the audience wants to ask you a question. If we would do that, you need to stay for another two weeks. Before I take somebody from that side, I would like to go to this side and give the word to not only a long-time editor-in-chief of the site, Tio Sommar, but also the founding dean of the Bensirio Summer School. Nice to see you. And before you ask, I ask you, when was the first time when you traveled to India? In which year? 1961. Wow. Sorry, 1967. It was a conference of the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. And your mother talked to us. Your grandmother talked to us. Sorry. Well, I have a question. Thank you. Here in Germany, all we talk about is about the Chinese century. And people have a feeling that India is limping far behind. So my first question is, are you catching up? And when will you have caught up? And my second question, what do you see for the future? There are problems between India and China. You have bordered skirmishes all the time. What is the line? Is it communication, cooperation, coexistence? Or is it going to be confrontation and conflict? Thank you. I don't think, well, I hope it isn't conflict. Because a conflict between India and China or a conflict between China and the United States is something that not only India, but I don't think the world can afford that. So I don't think it's going to be conflict. I think it's going to be a mix of the other things that you said. I think it's going to be a strategy. It's going to be cooperation sometimes. It's going to be pushing back other times. So I think you're going to get a mix of that. The other idea that you said, you know, who's winning the race? Now, this makes it sound that there is something, there's one thing that we're racing towards. But that's not how it really is. Because frankly, we have a completely different vision of ourselves than the Chinese do. And what we value is different than what the Chinese value. So it's a completely different set of things that we are actually fighting for. We like the idea, for example, that anybody can say anything in India. Now, you might say to me, well, China is growing at 11%, and India is growing at 9%, and I'll say to you, well, how many percent do you give the fact that anybody in India can say anything they want? I'll give that a couple percent. I'll give that maybe 3%. So where I run into a problem, where I run into a problem is a uniform sort of rule for what success is. I respect the German people enough to say, listen, how you define your future is up to you. That's why I didn't really tell you, you know, I didn't give advice to the German people. I can't give really advice to you. Because it's your vision of the world. It's what you have to do, and people will make certain compromises that maybe I won't make, and I'll make certain compromises that you won't make. So it's not a, this reductive sort of, you know, are you winning or are you losing? This is frankly 20th century stuff. 21st century is we're both winning. We're trying to win here, and I think you can win there. We will take a question from this side. Yes, and if you could introduce yourself briefly. Hi, I'm Sanika, and I'm studying a master's program here. I'm doing journalism. I understand that this is about local governance, and I'm supposed to probably ask something related to that. But my question is a little more towards introspecting about India from your thoughts. I'm doing my master's thesis on the Me Too movement, and I'm sure you must have heard about it or know about it. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are about women's safety in India, because recently there was a quite critically challenged piece on Reuters about how India is probably one of the most unsafe countries for women in India, in the world, and I was wondering what your thoughts about this topic was. I would disagree with the idea that India is the most unsafe place for women, but I would agree with the idea that the treatment of women in India leaves a lot to be desired. I think there is a huge amount of violence against women in India. A lot of it is visible, a lot of it is on the street. A huge amount of it is invisible, you never see it, it happens in houses. Women never talk about it. I think it is a cultural issue, it is an issue of how Indian men view Indian women, and I think it requires a huge amount of work to fix that problem. That's one component of it. The other component of it is that the level of violence in India, for the reasons I explained earlier, is increasing. And whenever the levels of violence increase, the people who are weakest bear the biggest front. So the fact that violence is increasing dramatically in India, women are actually getting a huge share of it. I think it is a tragedy. I think that is the single most important thing that India needs to do, is change the way its men view its women. And I think that is something that frankly is going to take a huge effort, but it is the duty of every single Indian to do it. Sorry, go ahead. But probably from a policy oriented or as a... A policy perspective, a couple of things. When I look at political parties, I don't see women representatives. When I look at the House of Parliament, when I look at legislators, I don't see the amount of women that I should, because if you don't put women in positions of power, you won't shape the laws. You won't get their voice into the system. So I do a lot of work to try and get women into the system, to try and get women into the Congress Party, and try and get women into the Lok Sabha, Rajasabha, Vidan Sabha. We are championing right now a bill of reservations for women in parliament. So that should be a big step going forward. But... And there's a lot that can be done on the policy side. There's a lot that frankly has been done. Even at the lower levels in the elections, places are reserved for women. But at the end of it, it is a cultural issue as well. It is literally the way the Indian male views the woman. He has to start viewing her as an equal. He has to start viewing her with respect. He has to start treating her with respect. And I'm sorry to say that he doesn't. There, right, you? Sorry, one, can I? Yes. See, one thing is for sure. You simply cannot build a successful country if you do not involve its women in building it. And that there, if you ask me, you know where, you know, you said, are you winning the race? That's a race I'd really like to win. I'd give that, I'd give that a couple, I'd give that a lot of weight. So now the mic is over there. Good evening, Mr. Gandhi. Good evening. My name is Richard Mantosh. I'm a lawyer from Kolkata, originally. I'm studying my master degree in law in Hamburg at present. So I had a very simple question. I've been trying to come up with intelligent questions, but the fact that you did already mention about China filling 50,000 jobs a day versus India filling 450 jobs a day, if next year, inevitably the elections will have results next year and your party is the largest party and will form the government, would you as the president of your party or the leader in Lok Sabha, would you speak about population control in India? Because India's population is going up. It's not being controlled. There is no population control. There's no family control measures. People are speaking about Swachh Bharat. There's a lot of talk going on, but nobody's walking the talk. So would you do that next year, sir? Well, a couple of things when you break down the issue of population. What you notice is that in the states that are doing well, population growth is stabilizing on its own. It is the states which are not doing well economically, which are Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, where population is an issue. Second thing is I don't view it so much as population. I view it much more as productive people. I don't have a problem with 1.3 billion people if they're educated and if they're in the workforce. I do have a problem if they're not educated and they're not in the workforce. They're not connected to the global economy. So I don't view the... I don't subscribe to the idea of the sort of harsh population measures that the Chinese did. I'm much more laissez-faire when it comes to these things. On the jobs, I'll give you two minutes. Jobs are only going to be created in India through small and medium businesses. And if you look at the amount of money that our small and medium businesses get, you look at the amount of support our small and medium businesses get from the banking system, from the political system, it is minuscule compared to the amount of support the top 15, 20 businesses get. So if you want to start competing with China and India, if you want to start competing and start creating jobs in India, you have to look towards small and medium businesses. And frankly, that's something that we can learn from the Germans who have such a system and have shown the world that it can be extremely successful. Thank you. Thank you so much, Raul Gandhi. We are already much over time. And so thank you so much for this wonderful talk and discussion with the audience. And I am so sorry for the huge amount of people here that couldn't raise their questions. I'm really sorry, but as you see, our time is limited and there were so many others who wanted to speak. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you very much for giving me your time. It's been an honor. Good night.