Slamming Prime Minister Narendra Modi and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat for holding patriarchal views on women, Congress MP and Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Saturday urged young girls to break this mindset and fight for their rights, saying they are the future of the nation.Addressing the interactive programme “Chhatron Ki Goonj” with female students and young professionals from various parts of Maharashtra, Rahul, while referring to Modi’s earlier comment describing as a “cultural shock” the fact that girls were using abusive language during the protest at Jantar Mantar, said both boys and girls had used abusive language, but the PM was surprised by girls doing so.“Both boys and girls used abusive language during the Jantar Mantar protest. However, while such language is often tolerated when used by boys, it comes as a cultural shock when girls use it. Bhagwat had said rapes occur only in India and not in ‘Bharat’, while Union Minister Manohar Lal had stated that 80 per cent of rape cases occur because of women,” Rahul said.“We are fighting this mindset, which says that women should be controlled, they should stay at home while boys should get full freedom to work and abuse. We want justice and respect for all. Women should remove this fear of control from their hearts and smash patriarchy. Be loud and proud and fight for your rights,” Rahul told a crowd of around 15,000 girls, mostly young undergraduates, at an engineering college ground.The Congress leader also criticised the centuries-old social tendency to categorise women first as daughters, then as wives and later as mothers.This, he said, is what the ancient treatise “Manusmriti” has ingrained in the minds of society: that women can never be independent, need to live in a cage and cannot have an identity beyond these defined social roles.Rahul spoke with women from various backgrounds and with different educational qualifications and heard about their experiences amid incessant cheering from a crowd that largely outnumbered the men.“Women are categorised as a wife, a daughter or a mother. But this cannot be their only identity. The words of Manusmriti, which categorise them as such, are a shame, since women have a much bigger identity of their own,” the Congress leader said.Rahul also shared data on how women are financially, violently, mentally and psychologically exploited.