Walking the extra mile: When Rahul Gandhi should embark on BJY 2.0

Giving voice to the 'voiceless': From pressing the flesh to breaking bread, Rahul Gandhi's foot march - his team says - will be a shoo-in

Even as the first anniversary of the Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY), or Unite India March, draws near, the challenge for the Congress, especially for party leader Rahul Gandhi’s closest aides, is how to sustain and scale up the ardour that the 135-day-long yatra stirred among workers and the adulation it inspired among people across the country for Rahul.

The team is on the horns of a dilemma — not if but when Rahul should embark on BJY 2.0. Should he begin the yatra from Gujarat’s Porbandar, the birthplace of the Mahatma, on October 2 and skip campaigning for the five Assembly polls, or start after these elections conclude and march across the country as it approaches the 2024 Lok Sabha elections?

The current wisdom in Rahul’s team favours the latter course.

The next few months will see Rahul continue to reach out to people — farmers, mechanics, gig workers, vendors, and unorganised sector workers — but primarily those who work with their hands and whose voices, whose daily struggles, no longer find their way into the country’s political and media discourse.

Rahul will also travel abroad to the Netherlands, France, and the Gulf countries to make the international chapters of the Indian Overseas Congress, the Sam Pitroda-headed overseas outreach of the party, more robust.

He is set to campaign extensively for the party candidates for the Assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, and Mizoram.

Rahul commenced the 4,080-kilometre (km) Kanyakumari-Srinagar foot march on September 7, 2022. Its first anniversary could see a four-part documentary by an independent filmmaker depicting religious polarisation and caste politics in Contemporary India, including an episode on the Maharashtra leg of Rahul’s South-to-North long march, hit a leading over-the-top platform next month and refresh the memories of BJY 1.0.

White Castle Strategy and Design, founded by young Mumbai-based filmmakers Arvind Gajanan Joshi and Mayuresh Chavan, is working on a four-part documentary on Contemporary India. Their past works include a Marathi documentary, Ajaat, or casteless, on caste discrimination and the efforts to save the hills around Pune.

“The series will show how those sitting in seats of power have little understanding of people’s daily lives,” Chavan tells Business Standard.

Rahul’s meeting, embracing, shaking hands, and breaking bread with people of all castes and religions, especially the most underprivileged, inspired the two to document the Maharashtra leg of the yatra.

The Congress leader’s effort to surmount social distances, especially with people who work with their hands, joining them in fixing a bike or planting paddy, has been the feature of his meetings with Haryana’s Dalit farmers, Bengaluru’s gig workers, and Delhi’s mechanics.

A team from Teen Bandar, a marketing communications company, has helped capture Rahul’s ‘discovery of India’ on video. Rahul has interacted with students of Delhi University and those preparing for civil service exams in the national Capital’s Mukherjee Nagar. He visited strife-torn Manipur and sat with women commuters on Bengaluru’s public transport. He has spent time among vegetable vendors in Delhi’s Azadpur wholesale market to understand rising prices and chatted with gig workers over a meal in Bengaluru.

“For us in Congress, the BJY extended version is already afoot. It can be seen in Rahul meeting people in different parts of India every week,” says one of his aides.

In the past few months, Rahul has met people from different social strata weekly. He has met farmers in Haryana’s Sonipat district, hosted Dalit women from the state at 10 Janpath, spent time with Karol Bagh’s motorcycle mechanics, travelled with truckers in the US during his visit to that country, and also travelled with an Indian trucker to Ambala.

A member of Rahul’s team told this newspaper on Sunday that he is personally committed to reprising the BJY despite niggling knee pain; he spent a week last month in Kerala to have ayurvedic treatment for the knee.

BJY 1.0 followed a punishing schedule where he walked 25 km daily in heat and rain, traversing 75 districts across 12 states and two Union Territories.

BJY 2.0 could be less frenetic. Rahul could, for example, target walking only half the 25 km a day he did, instead stopping and meeting many more people.

But BJY 2.0 is also likely to be more challenging.

“The mainstream media had been choked from giving us coverage during BJY 1.0. Our political opponents also opted to ignore us. We reached people through social media and succeeded. But now, especially after the Karnataka Assembly win, they will be warier of us,” says a Congress source.

The yatra, if undertaken, will need to contend with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s more fiery chief ministers, such as Uttar Pradesh’s Yogi Adityanath and Assam’s Himanta Biswa Sarma, as well as thorny issues like the controversy over Varanasi’s Gyanvapi mosque.

Whenever BJY 2.0 might happen, in the interregnum, Rahul’s meetings with the “voiceless”,  as his team describes them, have garnered hundreds of thousands of views on social media, burnishing his image as a leader with empathy, his team says.

It is a moot point whether it will suffice to challenge the charisma of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Still, it is a sea change from July 2019 when Rahul quit as his party’s chief after the embarrassing Lok Sabha defeat.