Rahul calls upon NRIs to join hands with Congress

Congress party vice president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday called on NRIs to join hands with the grand old party.

While addressing a gathering at Times Square, Gandhi said, "You (NRIs) have tremendous knowledge and understanding so you need to involve. I want to invite you to work with Congress to discuss vision for going forward. We want to take your help."

Asserting that NRIs are "our backbone," the Congress vice president averred, "everywhere you look, there is an Indian working for US and India, building both countries."

He further stated that great leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were all NRIs.

"The original Congress movement was an NRI movement. Mahatma Gandhi was an NRI, Jawaharlal Nehru came back from England. Ambedkar, Azad, Patel these were all NRIs. Every single one of them went to the outside world, saw the outside world, returned back to India and used some of the ideas that they had got and transformed India," adding that father of the White Revolution in India, Verghese Kurien, too was also an NRI.

"Congress Party is 130 years old, but we don't represent an organisation, we represent a philosophy of more than 1000 years old. People view India as a geographical construct, I view India as a set of ideas. We have many religions, languages and everyone are living happily together. The reasons they have been able to do so is due to ideas of the Congress party," he added.