Suggesting police highhandedness contributed to the Arab spring, Rahul Gandhi today made a strong pitch for police reforms as he interacted with street vendors.
Addressing a gathering of National Association of Street Vendors, he also promised to give the common people a direct say in the party's candidate selection process for Lok Sabha and assembly polls in future.
Gandhi also chose the occasion to flag the difference between BJP and Congress seeking to paint the oppositioin party as only being concerned with growth and not upliftment of the poor.
Narrating an interaction between him and an academician from Peru, the Congress Vice President said he was told that it was a suicide by a vendor in Tunisia due to police atrocities, which started the fire.
Latching on to the narrative, Gandhi used the occassion to hardsell his idea of createing a "minimum base" of support for the poor so that they do not live in perpetual insecurity.
"Governments in Tunisia and Libya depended upon the police. The police were suppressing the thelawals. The government could not come to know of it there.
"In India, we have democracy. So what happens in Tunisia and Libya does not take place here but here also you suffer. The police suppresses you and you are stressed," he said noting the Street Vendors Bill passed by Parliament aims at giving them minimum protection.
When a street vendor from Badarpur pointed out that even after passage of the bill, the police are harassing vendors there, Gandhi said while the specific case can be solved now, "the main issue is that we will keep hitting here and there as long as we do not to reform the police structure.
"The real solution will not come untill we give you rights and brought reforms in the police structure. Reforming police is a big issue. Police reform has to be carried out in a long process.
