Hamburg: Congress president Rahul Gandhi attributed incidents of lynching in India to ‘anger’ resulting from ‘joblessness’ in his address in Hamburg, Germany on Wednesday.

He also took a dig at the BJP-led government in India by blaming demonetisation and the GST, announcing that they are the reason behind the destruction of small businesses in India, that eventually result in unemployment.

In his address, Gandhi criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said that he “demonetised the Indian economy and destroyed the cash flow” of all small businesses, rendering millions jobless. “They imposed a badly conceptualised GST which complicated lives further,” the Congress leader said.

Gandhi is in Hamburg as part of a four-day tour of Germany and the United Kingdom.

On incidents of lynching and attacks on minorities, Gandhi said, “The reason for lynchings in India, attacks on Dalits and minorities, is that the huge, powerful transformation that India is going through requires protection for people and that protection is taken away”.

He went on to say, “If you don’t give people a vision in the 21st century, somebody else will. And that’s the real risk of excluding a large number of people from the development process”.

Gandhi went on to address insurgency in his speech and said that joblessness has led to the emergence of terror bodies like the ISIS.

He said that when the United States attacked Iran in 2003, they made a law prohibiting a particular tribe in Iran from being getting jobs in the government or the army. According to him, this resulted in a number of people joining the insurgency ‘that fought the US and caused massive casualties’.

He added, “It didn’t end there. That insurgence slowly entered empty spaces. It entered the empty space in Iraq and in Syria and then it connected with...a horrific idea called ISIS”.

The Congress head also mentioned the infamous hug that he shared with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Parliament. He said that his cadres did not like it, but he wanted to respond to Modi’s hateful remarks with affection.