Why is Rahul Gandhi walking 3,218 km across India?

Gandhi’s march could determine whether India’s fractured political opposition can do anything to halt the BJP

On the 76th day of his long march north through the entire length of India, Rahul Gandhi, scion of a once-mighty political dynasty, walked into a textile-making town in the middle of this vast country, his face and hair covered in dust.

Gone were the luxury trappings that his adversaries in BJP had used to caricature him as entitled and aloof. Now Gandhi was speaking of blistered feet and the struggle of the common man. He was shaking hands with children, hugging older men and women, on what he hoped was a 3,218-km journey out of the political wilderness for his once-dominant Congress party.

“Every democratic institution was shut for us by the government: Parliament, media, elections,” Gandhi, 52, told supporters late last month in Burhanpur, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. “There was no other way but to hit the streets to listen and connect with people.”

With a national election less than 16 months away, Gandhi’s march could determine whether India’s fractured political opposition can do anything to halt the era-defining ambitions of the governing BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The future of India as a multiparty democracy hangs in the balance. Modi, one of the most powerful leaders in India’s history, has remade its secular political foundation to privilege the Hindu majority and sideline Muslims and other minorities.

That Gandhi has found it necessary to walk the length of India, fighting to steal a ray of the spotlight and project a new profile, is the culmination of a once-unimaginable reversal of fortune for his family and party.

Congress led the country for two-thirds of its 75 years of independence, and the Gandhi-Nehru family has produced three prime ministers who governed for a total of nearly four decades.

As the Congress party has withered, its messy scandals and infighting have increasingly played out in public. The muddle created by the family’s inability to reconcile warring factions has resulted in stagnation at the local level, party officials say, and high-ranking defections.

“It is our last roll of the dice,” said Jairam Ramesh, a former minister who has been walking with Gandhi. “We are putting everything we have in it. If we don’t make a difference through it, then there is a problem for us both as a party and as an ideology.”