Congress president says he loves Modi

Mumbai: Interacting with students in Pune, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday said that he loves Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi even though the PM despises him. There were brief chants of ‘Modi, Modi’ soon after this comment, to which Mr Gandhi responded, ‘It’s fine.. it’s OK’.

The Congress president said, “I love PM Modi. Genuinely, I have no hatred or anger towards the man, but he (Modi) has anger towards me.”

Mr Gandhi said that he loves everybody, including those ‘temporarily blinded by hatred’. “Hatred is cowardice. I don’t care if the entire world is full of hatred. I am not a coward. I will not hide behind hate and anger. I love all living beings, including those temporarily blinded by hatred,” he tweeted.

Earlier, in March, Mr Gandhi had recalled the day he had hugged Mr Modi and said he could not hate him since love “is in the country’s grain, every religion, and the Tamil people”. He had made those remarks while interacting with the students of a college in Chennai.

When a student asked him why he chose to hug the Prime Minister, Gandhi had replied that he had watched a ‘very angry’ Mr Modi in the Parliament running down his party, his late father Rajiv Gandhi and mother Sonia.

After a fiery speech in the Parliament in October last year, Mr Gandhi had walked up to Mr Modi and hugged him, leaving the PM  Modi bewildered for a moment.