NEW DELHI: Rahul Gandhi, often tagged India's “prime minister-in-waiting”, told business leaders Thursday that the poor must see the benefits of economic growth in a keynote address designed to raise his profile.

Despite the sharply slowing economy and ballooning budget deficit, the ruling Congress party vice-president said he wanted to forge a “long-term partnership” with business to help the poor and release the nation's “beehive”energies.

“This country is only going to move forward if we all stand together,” Gandhi, 42, told the annual meeting of the Confederation of Indian Industry in a sometimes rambling address.

Gandhi, one of a string of big guns Congress wheeled out at the meeting to woo the crucial business community before 2014 polls, said “inclusive growth is win-win for everybody”.

“We have to carry the poor and weak with us,” he added.

In his first speech to a major corporate audience, the media-shy leader hailed the energy of the nation and talked of the need to change India's political system, but he was short on policy detail and gave no hints about his own ambitions.

He said that instead of the usual references to India as a slow-moving elephant, a far more apt comparison would be to a complex beehive — one of the most memorable lines of the speech and quickly picked up on social media.

Such complexity, he said, gave India the edge internationally and over its Asian rival China.

Gandhi — who comes from a line of three prime ministers and is second in the party's hierarchy after his mother, Sonia Gandhi — was non-committal about whether he would be a prime ministerial candidate in 2014.

“Whether I will become prime minister, this an irrelevant question — it's all smoke,” he said, adding that his goal was to “help one billion people find their voices”.

Business figures said they were impressed by Gandhi's sincerity but some highlighted how he had failed to propose solutions to the country's problems such as poor infrastructure, red tape and low business confidence.

“It's wonderful he spoke so much from the heart, but he also needs to speak from the head and be more pragmatic,” said Amarjit Singh, a director of multinational Motherson Automotive.

India goes to the polls in early 2014, with the ruling Congress party struggling with an economy which is growing at decade-low levels, as well as a string of corruption scandals.