Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday said he would focus more on job-creation than “growth-centric” policies had he been the Prime Minister of the country.

“I would move from just a growth-centric idea to a job-centric idea. I would say, we need growth but we are going to do everything to push production and job creation and value addition,” Gandhi said in reply to a qustion during an interaction with American Ambassador Nicholas Burns.

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Burns, a former Secretary of State in the George Bush administration from 2005 to 2008, currently serves as a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

“Currently if look at our growth, the type of relationship that should be there between our growth and job creation, between value addition, between production is not there. The Chinese lead value addition… I have never met a Chinese leader who says to me ‘I’ve got a job-creation problem,” Gandhi said. 

He further stated that even an economic growth of 9% will not mean as much to him if there aren’t corresponding figures for job-growth as well. 

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The former Congress chief alleged that opposition parties have functioned in an entirely different way since 2014, because of a “wholesale capture” of India’s institutions by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).  

He said that the country no longer has institutional structures, judicial systems, free media, financial parity and other factors that are needed to fight elections. 

“In Assam, the gentleman who is running our campaign (for the Assembly polls) has been sending me videos of BJP candidates running around with voting machines in their cars,” he said. 

About India-US relations, Gandhi said, “I don’t hear anything from US establishment about what’s happening in India. If you are saying partnership of democracies, I mean what is your view on what is going on here.”

He also praised the American idea of freedom. “I fundamentally believe that America is a profound idea. The idea of freedom the way it is encapsulated in your Constitution is a very powerful idea but you have got to defend that idea.”