Opinion As Rahul Hits The Road

Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, it is being said, will soon embark on a “kisan padyatra”, to meet farmers in distress in Maharashtra and Telangana. This comes at a time when the subject has changed, nationally, to rural discontent, and the Congress is struggling to regain lost political ground. His recent 16-km trek to the Kedarnath shrine in the Himalayas could also be parsed for political symbolism. With Bihar set for polls later this year, that yatra might even be read as a riposte to those who have sought to paint the Congress as “anti-Hindu”.

The template for the yatra as a political journey was arguably set by Mahatma Gandhi when he set out on the salt march in 1930, turning salt into a metaphor for the injustice embodied by colonialism. That yatra, which drew upon and resonated with the subcontinent’s pilgrimage tradition, inspired millions of Indians to stand up to the Empire. In post-Independence India, social activists and politicians of different ideological hue have sought to invoke and borrow from the Mahatma’s idiom, not always successfully, as they set out on road trips, on foot and in vehicles, with varied purposes and outcomes. Barring exceptions like Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan yatra to gain land for the landless, most other road journeys have had achieving or keeping political power as their destination. Socialist leader Chandra Shekhar gained in national stature after his countrywide Bharat yatra on foot in 1983, for instance, even though Indira Gandhi’s assassination handed the subsequent 1984 election to the Congress. L.K. Advani’s controversial rath yatra to Ayodhya in 1990 helped the BJP reinvent itself as the flagbearer of an aggressive Hindutva politics and laid the ground for its ascent to power at the Centre later in the 1990s. In more recent times, Congress leader Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy’s field trips during a time of agrarian distress in Andhra Pradesh helped him win office in 2004 after long years in the political wilderness. As chief minister, Nitish Kumar undertakes frequent yatras in Bihar to tide over the absence of a robust party organisation, or even, as his critics might say, to vault over it. Narendra Modi, for all his social media savviness, also reached out to potential voters during the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign through multiple yatras.

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Despite the advent of 24X7 television and social media, politicians continue to believe in the potential of the road trip to win elections, boost their own profile and energise cadres. For it to yield enduring political-electoral results, however, the leader needs an organisation that can build on the direct connect that has been established, and follow through. Rahul’s padyatras will be a test of the Congress’s organisational resilience as well.