Congress president Rahul Gandhi today claimed that the incidents of lynching in India were due to "anger" emanating from joblessness and "destruction" of small businesses due to demonetization and the "poorly implemented" GST by the ruling BJP. In his address in Hamburg, Germany, Gandhi traced the creation of ISIS to warn against a similar situation at home if people are excluded from the development process.

"It is very dangerous in the 21st century to exclude people. If you don't give people a vision in the 21st century somebody else will give them one. "And that's the real risk of excluding large number of people from our development processes," he said, accusing the BJP government of excluding tribals, Dalits and minorities from the development process. Asserting that the transformation taking place in the world requires certain protection for people, he accused the current dispensation in India of taking these protections away from them and hitting the informal economy through demonetisation and GST, causing anger which is leading to lynching incidents.