As Rahul Yatra nears end, Congress hits the road across states, a follow-up with Priyanka planned

As Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra enters its final leg, the units of the Congress in states where the march did not pass through are taking out state-wide marches at the direction of the high command. The party has also finalised a two-month ‘Haath se haath jodo (hand in hand)’ campaign from January 26 as a follow-up to the Bharat Jodo Yatra, with general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra playing a central role in it. There will be padayatras at the block level, covering all gram panchayats and booths, as part of this yatra. A letter from Rahul Gandhi talking about the yatra and a “chargesheet” against the Narendra Modi government would be distributed. Vadra will be leading “women’s marches” in every state as part of the yatra.

As in the case of Bharat Jodo Yatra, leaders holding the yatras are looking for light at the end of a very bleak electoral tunnel.

The Congress has been out of power in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh since 1990, Tripura since 1993 and Odisha since the dawn of this century. The case of Bengal is even worse. The party’s last chief minister was Siddartha Shankar Ray, in power from 1972 to 1977. Jharkhand has not seen a Congress chief minister at all since its formation in 2000.

Factionalism is also rampant in most state units of the Congress, which is another challenge for the party.

Among the leaders with the most onerous task is Akhilesh Singh, in Bihar. The Congress can no longer dream of contesting elections here on its own, and is a poor third wheel in the ruling JD(U)-RJD coalition. With Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge coming down to launch the Yatra, Singh has high hopes from it as well as from top-level participation of leaders in it, including party MLAs and its lone Lok Sabha MP (from Kishanganj).

Singh, who was appointed in December, says the Bihar yatra will highlight local issues too, though there is a question mark over it as the Congress is a part of the ruling coalition in the state.

“Of course, we will raise local issues. Otherwise, there is no meaning to the yatra. The main goal is to resurrect the Congress…like it was before 1990. We support the alliance but at the same time we have to resurrect the party too,” Singh, a Rajya Sabha MP, told The Indian Express.

He said the Congress was not “toeing every line” of the Nitish Kumar government. “When the hooch tragedy happened, we sent a five-member team, demanded compensation etc. So local issues will figure prominently.”

Organisationally, the Congress is in a similar situation in Bengal, except for the fact that its state unit leader, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, has national recognition (he is also the leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha), is combative, and is expected to go the whole hog against the Mamata Banerjee government.

“We are raising issues including corruption, law and order situation and Didi’s hidden understanding with (PM) Modi. Didi chup, Modi chup, aapas main ek understanding ban raha hai (Both Mamata and Modi are silent, an understanding is brewing between the two). We are talking about all these issues,” Chowdhury told The Indian Express.

Unlike Rahul’s Yatra, the state yatris don’t have containers to stay in. The leaders stay at houses of prominent local leaders or in hotels at district headquarters. Chowdhury claims that despite niggling problems, the response to the state yatra has so far been “more than the expectations”. “We don’t have a crowd-puller like Rahul Gandhi. Our organisation too is weak. We don’t have resources either. But people are pouring in. Even some civil society people have joined,” Chowdhury said.

In Assam, the Congress is on a much better wicket organisationally, despite the second consecutive Assembly election defeat in 2021. The state yatra here started on November 1 and culminated on December 16, covering 15 districts, nine Lok Sabha constituencies and 51 Assembly seats.

Lok Sabha MP Pradyut Bordoloi says: “There was tremendous response from people. Not only Congress people and supporters, common people also participated in large numbers,”

He also dismisses reports about factionalism in the Assam Congress as exaggerated. “See, there are leaders and, of course, they have their own followers. It is like this everywhere. But we are all united in Assam,” he said.

In Tripura, Jharkhand and UP, the Congress leaders did not walk from one end of the state to the other, unlike other states. “We divided ourselves into 17 teams and each team, headed by a senior leader, covered three-four Assembly constituencies and 1,700 km. So we covered every Assembly constituency over a period of 10 days,” AICC in-charge of Tripura Ajoy Kumar says.

Jharkhand too saw a similar exercise. “We held yatras at district, Assembly constituency and block levels. I went to all the 25 organisational districts where yatras were taken out. We began the exercise in September itself, and yatras are still being organised in some blocks,” state Congress president Rajesh Thakur says.

He argues that unlike the Bharat Jodo Yatra, they could not have had a fixed route, as that would mean “we would not be able to connect with all the people”. “The terrain of Jharkhand is different… it is sparsely populated,” Thakur points out.

Like his Bihar counterpart, Thakur too had a challenge because the Congress is part of the government in the state. “We let local leaders speak at the public meeting at the end of the yatra in every district. So local issues were also raised. But largely we spoke about the misgovernance of the Modi government and highlighted the achievements of the JMM-Congress government,” Thakur says.

Most leaders believe the yatras have energised the party. “There is some organisational activity at last. Whether all this will lead to electoral revival of the party depends on whether we are able to sustain the momentum. That purely depends on the organisation and state-level leaders,” one senior leader says.