A day after former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh launched a scathing attack on the Modi government, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi raised the pitch one notch up on Thursday: the ruling dispensation, he said, was converting the country into a RSS shakha, similar to Hitler’s experiment in Nazi Germany, even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi was being forced to take lessons in how to run the country’s economy from his predecessor.

In a short, sharp speech to party workers on the second day of the National Students Union of India (NSUI) convention here on Thursday, Mr. Gandhi said, “The RSS doesn’t allow debate or dialogue. Discipline is used as an excuse to murder individuality and an excuse to silence lakhs of people.”

Mr. Gandhi’s barbs about the RSS provoked a stream of protest-tweets: irate BJP and RSS leaders — from Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu to RSS spokesperson-turned-BJP general secretary Ram Madhav to BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi to BJP spokesperson Nalin Kohli to the RSS’s Manmohan Vaidya — all returned fire.

If Mr. Naidu said his party had nothing to learn from a person, who was an occasional visitor to Parliament, Mr. Madhav tweeted: “Great grandpa tried it; grandma tried; papa too. 4 generations of futile hatred. RSS grew. Cong?”

Earlier, Mr. Gandhi exhorted the NSUI to fight the RSS’ bid to impose its ideology in educational institutions.

‘BJP trying to stop all dialogue’

Mr. Gandhi told the NSUI convention that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh did not believe in dialogue.

Stressing that all Indians have minds of their own, Mr. Gandhi said, “Those belonging to the shakhas don’t understand [that] every person has knowledge, and knows what’s good for him.”

The Congress, he said, was characterised by internal dialogue, something missing in the BJP: worse, he alleged, the ruling party “was trying to stop the internal dialogue of the entire country.”

Exhorting the NSUI to fight the RSS ideologically, he said, “Wherever the RSS tries to impose its thought processes, stop them. Wherever they want to impose the order of the shakha, replace it with the Congress’s disorder.”

Taking a swipe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi – who had invited former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to 7, Race Course Road on Wednesday evening to discuss economics and foreign policy — Mr. Gandhi said, “After Manmohanji said yesterday the economy is going down, the PM invited him for an hour-long pathshala [class]. Perhaps he tried to understand how the economy runs — I will ask Dr. Singh,” drawing a roar of laughter from his audience.

Indeed, Mr. Gandhi’s mocking statement about Mr. Modi needing lessons from Dr. Singh put paid to speculation that the Congress leadership was not happy about the meeting – or that it had not known about it. The meeting had taken place hours after the former PM, in an uncharacteristically aggressive speech, questioned the Modi government’s claims to economic development, saying rural India was in acute distress and that the economic recovery was “fragile.”