Gujarat Confidential: Walk With Rahul

AMONG those from Gujarat who joined Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on the Bharat Jodo yatra, was Surat-based Tanveer Jafri, son of late Congress MP Ahsan Jafri who was killed in the Gulberg Society massacre in Ahmedabad in 2002. He took the walk in the Maharashtra leg, walking for two days and covering around 35 km.  Jafri said, “I personally made arrangements and went to Jalgaon in Maharashtra and met Rahul and walked with him for 35 kilometres for two days.” Former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh Digvijaya Singh introduced him to Gandhi, and he walked by his side for “about 50 seconds”,  and joined the masses, “as he (Gandhi) was walking quite fast”, Jafri said. He said that Gandhi sent “salaams” for his mother Zakia. According to Jafri, he joined the walk to “send a message to the future generation in his family that ‘I was alive when Rahul Gandhi took out the Bharat Jodo Yatra and that I had joined it’”.

The bridge memory

As the general board of the Morbi municipality convened in the hall in the life and death registration department of Morbi municipality headquarters last week to decide the civic body’s response to a government notice asking why the general board should not be dissolved, a large poster of the Jhulto Pul suspension bridge on the wall, stood out. The faded yet vivid photo of the historic bridge in the poster had logos of the Oreva group. The government notice had come in the wake of the collapse of the Jhulto Pul that the municipality had handed over to the Oreva group for operations and maintenance. But councillors hardly noticed the poster. Instead, they were seen warning each other not to sit on chairs where there was danger of layers of plaster falling off the ceiling of the hall.