The Congress party on Tuesday, 23 December 2025, shared a video of Congress scion Rahul Gandhi from his visit to a BMW factory in Germany, where he spoke about the global shift in mobility, India’s manufacturing potential, and the need for a new growth model centred on production and employment.
In the video posted on X, Gandhi said the automobile industry was undergoing a fundamental transformation as companies moved away from internal combustion engines towards electric mobility, a transition reshaping global manufacturing. Referring to China’s progress, he said the shift had given Beijing a significant competitive advantage.
Democratic Model Of Production: Growth for many, not profits for a few pic.twitter.com/lURqObL0L0
— Congress (@INCIndia) December 23, 2025
“Look at what China has done in electric vehicles. Using a different form of mobility, they now have a huge competitive advantage. So, for countries like ours, where we have a lot of infrastructure to build, and we have large scale, we can actually do quite interesting things,” he said.
Taking aim at the BJP-led central government, Gandhi alleged that current policies had discouraged manufacturing by concentrating economic power in the hands of a few large corporate groups. Speaking at the Hertie School in Berlin, he said large-scale job creation in India was possible only through manufacturing.
“On the question of jobs there is only one way that you can produce jobs at scale for a country like India and that is manufacturing. And what we’ve done in India and what the BJP has done, they’ve completely disincentivized manufacturing,” Gandhi said.
He alleged that major corporate houses were more focused on trading than production. “When they concentrate power into the hands of you know three or four oligarchs, the Ambanis and Adanis of the world, these are not guys who are interested in manufacturing. If you look at what they do, they’re trading companies. They’re not producing companies. And essentially most of them are selling Chinese product in India,” he said.
Outlining an alternative approach, Gandhi said a Congress-led government would focus on strengthening small and medium industries, expanding employment in agriculture-linked sectors such as cold chains and food processing, and reworking the tax structure.
“So, what we would do is we would look at, in fact some of the stuff that we are seeing in Germany, we would look at how to build up small and medium industry. We would look at how to create jobs in agriculture and jobs in the connection between agriculture and the rest of the economy, cold chain, food processing and then we would look seriously at manufacturing, and we would realign our GST for example which today is completely anti-producer and pro-consumer. we would try and realign some of those structures,” he said.
Gandhi argued that India possessed the population, skills, and cost advantages necessary to emerge as a major manufacturing hub but said economic growth must be balanced with democratic values, environmental responsibility, and social inclusion.
“We have the capability to produce, we have the population to produce, we have the cost structure to produce. What does the next model of Indian growth look like? It has to have production, right? It has to have a production that occurs in a democratic environment. It has to have a vision for the environment. It has to have a vision for the weaker sections of society, with the more marginalised sections of society. But it has to create prosperity,” he added.
Source: Business Standard
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