Congress MP and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, who is on a three-day visit to the United States, said on Tuesday that he doesn’t hate Prime Minister Narendra Modi but disagrees with his political rival’s point of view.

During an interaction at Georgetown University, Washington DC, Gandhi said, “I don’t hate Mr Modi. He has a point of view; I don’t agree with the point of view, but I don’t hate him. He has a different perspective, and I have a different perspective.”

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Referring to the alleged seizure of Congress party’s bank accounts just before the Lok Sabha elections, the Gandhi scion said that his party fought the general elections with a serious fund crunch yet it destroyed what he called “the idea of Mr Modi”.

“I was watching the (Lok Sabha) elections…At a point in the elections, we sat down with our treasurer, and he said, ‘Look, the bank accounts are frozen’. The Congress party fought the elections with their bank accounts frozen and destroyed the idea of Modi,” he said.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress nearly doubled its seats and stopped the BJP well short of a majority for the first time in a decade.

Gandhi claimed that although the BJP still managed to come to power with the help of smaller allies, the results were a setback for the prime minister and that he has not been able to come to terms with it.

“You can see it because when you see the prime minister now in Parliament… he is psychologically trapped, and he basically cannot come to terms, he cannot understand how this has happened,” he remarked.

The Congress leader further said that Mr Modi was psychologically “blown apart” halfway through the elections as he sensed he is not near the 300-400 seats target.

“Halfway through the campaign, Modi didn’t think that he was near 300-400 seats…We were getting information from regular sources, some of the intelligence agencies…it was very clear. There was this internal thing going on in the Prime Minister that I could see…he (PM Modi) was in Gujarat for many years, never faced adversity, and became Prime Minister of India. And suddenly, this idea started to crack.

“We knew when he said that I speak directly to God. We knew that there we had blown him apart…We saw it as a psychological collapse,” he added.