“What is the best place to eat in Cambridge these days?” Rahul Gandhi asks us when we meet for an interview. We are taken by surprise: it is not the question we expected to be asked by one of the leading politicians of the largest democracy in the world.

Gandhi, of course, knows all about Cambridge student life, having read for an MPhil in Development Studies at Trinity College in 1995. He remembers the experience fondly. “Cambridge was immensely influential in shaping the person I am today,” he says.

Rahul Gandhi is the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family, India’s most prominent political dynasty. His mother, Sonia Gandhi, is currently the leader of the Indian National Congress, while his late father, Rajiv Gandhi, was Prime Minister of India from 1984 to 1989. His grandmother was Indira Gandhi, who served as Prime Minister for 15 years, and his great-grandfather was Jawaharlal Nehru, who was India’s first Prime Minister in 1947.

Born into a family that is so used to occupying centre stage, it was a huge change for Gandhi to come to Cambridge as “just another student”. As he recalls, “it was a very strange time – my father had just died, and I went from that to being in a place where no one knew who I was.”

Gandhi stayed away from the political sphere for some time after graduating from Cambridge, but it seems that the desire to follow in his family’s footsteps was too strong to ignore: he has now appeared on the political scene as a major voice. He was recently re-elected to the Lok Sabha in 2009, representing the constituency of Amethi. Political observers think that he may be the man to lead the country one day.

The desire to interview Rahul Gandhi was a result of our stay in India last summer. We had spent the summer at a placement with the Latika Roy Foundation, which is a charity that supports children and young adults with special needs. We arrived a week after the Right to Education Act (August 2009) had been passed, and were very interested in getting Gandhi’s opinion on it.

The Act aimed to provide free and compulsory education to all children aged 6 to 14; a big step in Indian educational policy. However, from the viewpoint of children with special needs, there were still significant gaps. It brought to our attention the complexities of state-sponsored education and the need for such education to support all. As one of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), India’s development is of crucial importance to the rest of the world.

Gandhi is intimately involved with education in India. In September 2007, he accepted the position to lead the Youth Congress as well as the National Students Union. As such, he feels very strongly about the importance of education and the need for expanding the education system.

He said, “If India is to move forward, we need to allow all of our citizens access to opportunity, and to do that, they need access to education. It is not okay for disabled people not to have access to education, or the opportunities that follow from it.”

Gandhi has a particularly unique vantage point in tackling the education debate, having attended school not only in India and the UK, but also in the US (he graduated from Florida’s Rollins College in 1994). With recent statements such as President Obama’s on the importance of an education system that “will allow us to compete with China and India”, it is clear that comparative studies may be of critical use.

Gandhi agreed that the Indian education system did differ from that of the UK and US. “The relationship of students with teachers is different in the US from India. In the US, students called their lecturers by their first name and I remember being pleasantly surprised by that.”

“Asking questions is actively discouraged in the Indian education system. At university in India, students are actively discouraged from coming up with their own ideas and from disagreeing with the lecturer.”

He recalls a time when he plucked up the courage to ask a question in physics, only to receive the reply of “because this is how it is”. In contrast, Gandhi is impressed with the education he received at Cambridge.

He explains, “The Indian education system focuses too much on learning by rote, and not enough on learning to think by yourself. The American system is about questioning knowledge. The British education system is a balance between the two.”

Despite the shortcomings of the Indian education system, Gandhi believes in the potential of Indian students. He says, “The discipline, diligence and motivation of Indian students is unparalleled.”

Education remains arguably the most crucial foundation for the development of Indian society, and more crucial still for a functioning liberal democracy. India seems to be bursting at the seams demographically. How the education system will accommodate this influx of students is a tough question.

Complicating matters further are such questions as the extent to which there should be preferential treatment in the education system for members of the lower castes and women. Gandhi supports such action, arguing that “for now it is absolutely necessary. Ideally, we’d create more places at good universities, and improve the standards of the remaining ones until everyone who wanted a good education could get one.”

He adds, “But we have to be realistic. There are some groups in India that have been discriminated against historically and they need help to access higher education.”

Gandhi has a clear vision of where he wants Indian education to go. “Education can’t be about telling students what to think anymore. The role of teachers should be about helping children to manage all the different sources of information, and to make decisions for themselves about what they believe based on critical evaluation of the competing sources of information.”