What has the Bharat Jodo Yatra achieved? Can Rahul win from Amethi again?

The Rahul message has no political relevance. It's all been a gigantic waste of time - which is plentiful for Congress - and money, which is not

So the Bharat Jodo Yatra has ended. It was organised by the Congress party and lasted around five months, during which time its leader Rahul Gandhi walked 3,500 kilometres from Kerala to Kashmir. Good for him.

The Yatra was not his idea, but its message was. The guys who thought up the Yatra didn't want it to be completely apolitical, but that's what Rahul wanted. So they repurposed it as a rebranding of Rahul.

Good for them, too, though we don't know why a politician would want to be branded as a not-politician. I mean, how can we trust a saint to be a prime minister?

Anyway, now what? The first test of the message, post-Yatra, will be in Karnataka, where the assembly elections are due soon. Given the disarray in the BJP there, it may well end up losing.

The Congress will interpret that as a success of Rahul's "healing" message and carry it onward into the remaining eight assembly elections this year. But that would be drawing an entirely wrong conclusion because it's not clear to the electorate what is being jodo-ed to what and why.

In any case, the BJP and the RSS have decided to change tack this year. If Rahul wants to apply Fevicol, they are happy with papering things over. They anyway think the Muslim vote doesn't matter.

They now also believe that the political fight is largely between Hindu castes as it has always been. It's that intra-Hindu fighting that made the Muslim vote relevant in some parts of India.

But even that political relevance is gone for good except in Kerala and West Bengal, where Muslims constitute about a third of the population and are concentrated in several pockets of constituencies.

The electorate simply doesn't see Bharat as being in need of jodo-ing. The Rahul message, therefore, has no political relevance. It's all been a gigantic waste of time — which is plentiful for Congress — and money, which is not.

If the party isn't going to benefit, how does the reshaping of Rahul's image as a nice chap help it? Or let me ask the trillion-dollar question: can he win from Amethi again? It is futile to push on a string, and that's what Rahul insists on doing.

In this context, let me recall another exercise in rebranding a very poorly regarded politician. He was also important to the party, though not as important as Rahul is to his party.

He had rivals in his own party and critics all over the world. Rahul has neither. He had none of the advantages Rahul enjoys. Yet, his rebranding was stunningly successful. Yes, you have guessed correctly: Narendra Damodardas Modi.

He didn't do it, as Rahul has done, directly. It was done indirectly via Vibrant Gujarat, which, says the former senator Larry Pressler in his book Neighbours in Arms, hired an American PR firm called APCO Worldwide. Pressler writes, "As a global public relations firm, APCO has vast experience in polishing tainted reputations".

The increase in promised investment in Gujarat between 2008 and 2011 — from $150 to 450 billion — actually helped Mr Modi more. He emerged as the "Development Man".

What has Rahul emerged as? At best, a T-shirt man.