An underwhelming yatra

It is tempting to compare Rahul's current yatra with that of former BJP stalwart L K Advani’s 1990 Rath Yatra – or should one say 'wrath yatra'

No denying that the Indian National Congress (INC) leader Rahul Gandhi’s ongoing Bharat Jodo Yatra – which may be loosely translated as ‘knit India together journey’ – has enthused and inspired vast numbers of people along his route and that it has won support from many prominent people concerned about democracy and human rights.

Among them are noted pro-democracy and pro-human rights activists such as the former chief of naval staff Admiral (retd) L Ramdas and Lalita Ramdas, filmmaker Kavitha Lankesh and her mother Indira (sister and mother, respectively, of the assassinated journalist Gauri Lankesh), actors Prakash Rai and Swara Bhaskar, noted Bengaluru theatre person Kirtana Kumar, eminent actor-director Amol Palekar, Carnatic vocalist TM Krishna, Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada movement) activist Medha Patkar and many others.

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Rahul Gandhi is about three-fourths of the way along his Kanyakumari to Kashmir trajectory. Along which he has endeared himself to commoners and politicians, celebrities and nobodies.

It is tempting to compare his current yatra with that of former BJP stalwart L K Advani’s 1990 Rath Yatra – or should one say “wrath yatra” – campaigning for the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, which caused much bloodshed until it was stopped in its tracks by the then Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav.

Rahul Gandhi’s has been entirely peaceful thus far, and full of bonhomie.

However, his yatra has been getting next to no attention on electronic media, which are almost entirely beholden to the BJP, an extremely rich entity that also commands a vast IT cell, and it is getting little print media attention, too.

So, the question arises: What is the point of his expensive, time-consuming exercise limited to a few states, and to a few districts within them, on his current itinerary?

Might his and his party’s resources not have been better spent in more assiduous work seeking workers and volunteers such as the ones who had stood by the party in the first few decades post-Independence?

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This writer remembers a time when there was a Congress Seva Dal, something of a secular antidote to the anti-minorities progenitor of the BJP, the RSS, which and whose offshoots such as the Bajrang Dal and Sri Ram Sene have been wreaking havoc in Karnataka and elsewhere. There seems to be next to no secular entity now to counter the RSS, BJP and Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

Has Rahul Gandhi made any effort at uniting the INC itself, which is faction-ridden in many states? During his march through Kerala, did he sort out the ideological confusion in INC ranks? The party there has taken to opposing the Left Democratic Front government, backing anti-secular stances such as on women’s entry into Sabarimala temple and has become indistinguishable from the state’s growing Hindu communal constituency.

And while passing through Karnataka, did he try to settle the internal squabbling in his party and, equally crucially, seek to forge an alliance with the JD(S) so as to avoid splitting the non-BJP vote?

He spent hardly any time campaigning in Gujarat, in contrast to Narendra Modi – who seemed to have taken a long leave from his prime ministerial duties to campaign long and hard – and the INC’s disastrous showing reflects that. The INC’s victory in Himachal Pradesh is being credited to the campaigning by his sister Priyanka and Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel.

His ‘knit-India’ journey would be meaningless if it did not also seek to heal the wounds on the body politic of India the INC has inflicted in the past.

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The aforementioned Kirtana Kumar’s sister-in-law, Nandana Reddy, had said she would have joined the yatra provided Rahul Gandhi apologised for what his party’s regime did to her mother, the legendary actor Snehalatha Reddy, who died shortly following her incarceration in Bengaluru during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (June 1975-March 1977).

Many more apologies from the INC are due if the yatra is to be taken seriously.

Rahul Gandhi and the INC ought to apologise for the party’s communal past, make substantial amends, resurrect secular politics and stop competing with BJP’s – not to put too fine a point on it – Hindu-supremacist authoritarianism.

His father Rajiv Gandhi, who became Prime Minister following a landslide election after the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, sought to defend it saying, “when a big tree falls, the earth shakes”. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, himself a Sikh, offered an apology for 1984 but the party as a whole has
not echoed that apology in any meaningful way.

Of course, the sins of fathers should not be visited upon their progeny: Rahul Gandhi was a mere teenager then. However, as recently as in 2020, one of the Congress leaders alleged to have overseen the pogrom, Kamal Nath, was made Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister and Rahul Gandhi was seen holding hands with him during the yatra in late November.

Not to forget that in 1992 the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya was destroyed while the then PM P V Narasimha Rao was – perhaps deliberately – asleep at the wheel. An estimated 2,000 Muslims were killed in the subsequent carnage.

The impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of the 1984 and 1992 events most likely emboldened in 2002 the then Gujarat Chief Minister, now India’s Prime Minister, to look on as an anti-Muslim pogrom claimed some 2,000 lives.

Apart from 1984 and 1992 and starting from the Shah Bano case and the Sabarimala one, the INC has been shirking from standing up for secularism. Since the early 1970s, it has become an ideologically rootless party. It resembles the Aam Aadmi Party in the embrace of ‘soft Hindutva’, minus the AAP’s welfarist measures.

Many recent elections in countries such as Brazil, Chile, Malaysia and Denmark have shown that pro-democracy and pro-human rights parties can and do make it. That is a gamble India’s oldest political party ought to take, declaring that it would henceforth be standing scrupulously by the provisions of the Constitution bequeathed to us by Babasaheb Ambedkar and other visionaries.

(The writer is a senior journalist)