Rahul Gandhi: The only way to move forward after being victim of violence is forgiveness

Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said he and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra were not happy after his father's (Rajiv Gandhi) killer, LTTE chief Prabhakaran was killed, as they felt "the violence inflicted upon him had impacted others, including his children".

While addressing a gathering at Bucerius Summer School here, Gandhi said he lost two members of his family due to violence.

"My grandmother (Indira Gandhi) and my father (Rajiv Gandhi) were both killed. So, I have suffered violence. I am talking actually from experience. The only way you can move forward after violence is forgiveness. There is no other way. And to forgive you have to understand what exactly happened and why it happened."

He said: "To deal with it is to actually listen and act non-violently. People think this is weakness. But, in fact this is strength. My father was killed by a terrorist in 1991. In 2009, I saw the person who killed my father lying in a field in Sri Lanka.

He went on to say: "I called up my sister Priyanka and said that this is very strange, but I am not happy. I should be celebrating that the person who is dead is the person who killed my father. But somehow I am not happy. She said: 'you are right, I am not happy either'."

"The reason I wasn't happy was because I saw myself in his children. So, I realised, him lying there actually means that there are kids like me who are crying," he added.

"He might have been a bad or an evil person, but the violence that was done against him was impacting others, like it had impacted me. If you go deep, you will find there is something that triggered that violence. It's not just a random event. Some action or violence done against him or her has triggered it," he also added.

Indira Gandhi was shot dead by two of her bodyguards at her official residence here on October 31, 1984 while a suicide bomber from Sri Lanka's now vanquished Tamil Tigers group blew up Rajiv Gandhi at an election rally in Tamil Nadu on May 21, 1991.

Sri Lankan security forces shot dead Prabhakaran and virtually destroyed the Tamil Tigers in May 2009, ending a quarter century of separatist war in the island nation.

Rahul Gandhi also said that the only way one can fight violence is by non-violence. "There is no other way. You might be under the illusion that you can fight violence with violence, but it will come back. You might think that you are very powerful and that you can subdue somebody else, but they will find a way of coming back."

"Violence is being cause because of a certain anger inside. Until you understand and remove the anger, it is going to remain there. You can't fight violence with more violence."