Beyond the Yatra

Rahul may have got an image makeover but Congress gains unclear

After 134 days spent traversing 12 states, clocking nearly 4,000 km and meeting thousands of Indians in varied interactions (sitting, walking, press conferences, and so on) Rahul Gandhi ended his Bharat Jodo (Unite India) Yatra in Srinagar on Monday with a closing ceremony attended by several leaders of non-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) outfits or their representatives. The heavy snowfall did not appear to dampen the spirits of 52-year-old Mr Gandhi. Lightly clad in just a T-shirt in solidarity with — he said — two poor and inadequately clad children he had met in Kashmir, he sought to present himself as the kinder, gentler custodian of India’s future. The key question is whether the Yatra has injected sufficient credibility into the Congress, which has suffered debilitating electoral reverses and infighting since 2014, to present it as a viable national alternative to the BJP or a plausible platform to unite Opposition parties.
 

The aims of the Bharat Jodo Yatra were somewhat nebulous: “To unite India, to come together and strengthen our nation”, the Congress website said. This could mean anything. In contrast L K Advani’s Somnath to Ayodhya Rath Yatra of 1990 immeasurably strengthened the BJP’s political fortunes because it had an unambiguous purpose: To mobilise support for the construction of a temple on the site of the (then still standing) Babri Masjid. Mr Gandhi frequently emphasised the fact that his Yatra was not targeted at winning elections, and he kept his word by plodding resolutely through Karnataka when the Assembly elections in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh were held. But any statement by a political party to “unite India” without reference to an electoral agenda is a meaningless exercise.
 

If the Yatra has yielded immediate gain it is in changing perceptions about Mr Gandhi. Certainly, in his willingness to put in the hard yards and insist that he would listen to the people, Mr Gandhi has managed to outgrow his image as the naïve and indolent dilettante scion of a powerful political family. But it is unclear whether his new mature, bearded persona resonates quite as effectively with large swathes of the Indian population as that of a skilled orator such as Narendra Modi does.
 

It is also worth noting that Mr Gandhi is not Congress president, having resigned following the party’s Lok Sabha rout in 2019, but an MP (from Wayanad in Kerala, he lost his family’s pocket borough in UP to the BJP). By way of comparison, Mr Advani was BJP president when he embarked on the Rath Yatra. The fact that the Congress pulled out all the stops to facilitate a Yatra — there are no figures to indicate how much it spent — for an MP’s discovery of India suggests that the party is yet to overcome its weakness as a Nehru-Gandhi family enterprise. It is possible that the interactions in Mr Gandhi’s energetic sojourn may yield an articulate and cohesive agenda that unites the party from the ground up and appeals to the Indian electorate. All of this will be tested in the upcoming “semi-final” of nine Assembly elections ahead of the 2024 parliamentary elections.