Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his speech in the Lok Sabha, alleging that Modi spoke about [former Prime Minister] Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan but skirted real problems like unemployment, the Hindustan Times reported.

“PM Modi’s style is to distract the country from the core issues,” Gandhi told reporters outside Parliament after the prime minister had finished delivering his address during the discussion on the Motion of Thanks to the president in the Lok Sabha. “He talks of Congress, of Jawaharlal Nehru, of Pakistan, etc but not of core issues.”

Modi had attacked the Congress for its insistence that the Constitution must be “saved from the Bharatiya Janata Party”, wondering whether the party was saving the Constitution when it imposed the Emergency between 1975 and 1977. The prime minister, referring to the Citizenship Amendment Act, said even Nehru had wanted to protect minorities from Pakistan, and asked the Congress whether the first prime minister was communal for believing so.

“The biggest issue today is unemployment and jobs, we asked PM many times, but he did not say a word on this,” Gandhi told reporters. “Earlier, the finance minister gave a long speech but she also did not say a word on it.”

During his speech, Modi said that “an opposition leader” had said on Wednesday at a rally in Delhi that the youth will “beat him with sticks” for the lack of jobs. Following this, Gandhi rose to interject the prime minister, NDTV reported. In response, Modi said: “I have been speaking for 30-40 minutes but it took this long for the current to reach him. Many tube lights are like this.”

The prime minister added that he would increase his frequency of exercise in order to protect his back against the blows the youth of the country would land upon him. “The kind of abuses I have been subjected to in the last 20 years, I will make myself abuse-proof, and lathi-proof,” Modi said, to laughter and desk-thumping from BJP MPs.