Congress party’s second-in-command Rahul Gandhi has called for changing the way the country is being run.

In his first speech after taking over as Vice-President of the Grand Old Party, he said the time has come to question the “centralised, unresponsive and unaccountable system, decision making and governance, administration and politics.”

Widely seen as the “Obama Moment” of the 42-year-old Congress leader, the speech was received by the All India Congress Committee members with thunderous applause. Leaders sitting on the dais and in the audience were seen getting emotional when Rahul Gandhi mentioned his grandmother, Indira Gandhi, his father Rajiv Gandhi and his mother and the Congress President, Sonia Gandhi in the speech.

Laying down his agenda for change, Gandhi said a handful of people are deciding the future of the common man in the country “behind closed doors”.

“They are telling us that India’s governmental system is stuck in the past, it has become a system that robs people of their voice, a system that disempowers instead of empowering,” he said.

He said the system does not believe in empowering people all the way to the bottom. He said the youth of the country are angry because they are alienated and excluded from the political process.

“All our public systems, administration, justice, education, political systems... all of them are designed to keep people with knowledge out. They are all closed systems. They are designed to promote mediocrity and mediocrity dominates,” he said.

Gandhi added that schemes like Aadhaar and direct cash transfer are going to empower the delivery mechanism.

The two-day Chintan Shivir and one-day session of the AICC concluded here on Sunday with Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh assuring the delegates that the UPA’s programmes are drafted in a way that will address the problems of the common man.

Sonia Gandhi stressed that petroleum prices were hiked due to fluctuations in the international market and not due to domestic compulsions.

jigeesh.am@thehindu.co.in

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