Bharat Jodo Yatra: Is nobility of purpose enough?

The best thing about the Bharat Jodo Yatra is that the Congress is trying to find a higher purpose in an age of deep cynicism and hopelessness among those who seek to challenge the BJP juggernaut of division, enforcement and Hindutva underwritten by big money. India's always imperfect democracy is indeed confronted with a larger institutional crisis.

That is why the very act of stepping out for a larger cause by the Congress must be appreciated, along with the fact that an atrophying party has indeed set off on a mass contact journey. What is also noteworthy is that after great confusion over ideological positioning, the Congress appears to have settled on the decision that nationally it would be harking back to its own ideology and that of the Indian Constitution. That, too, is welcome.

There has simultaneously been criticism of the route that the yatra has mapped out, with one CPI (M) member writing an editorial in a national daily accusing Rahul Gandhi of "marching away from reality at a steady pace" in choosing to spend 19 days in Left ruled Kerala, not touch Gujarat that has elections later this year and just briefly passes Uttar Pradesh, the other laboratory of the BJP, besides the PM's home state. But the truth is that the Congress is electorally grasping at straws in a national contest.

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Just look at the data. In the 2019 general election, the party got just 52 seats, 15 of which came from Kerala and eight from Punjab, where the Congress was then in power (the state has 13 seats) but has since been won by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is also projecting itself nationally. The Congress also won eight seats in Tamil Nadu, where it is in an alliance with the DMK (which won 20 seats), and the front swept the state in 2019. Therefore, it made perfect sense for the yatra to begin in Kanyakumari, with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin also making an appearance.

Rahul Gandhi is said to have excellent relations with CPI (M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, and many see both parties as partners in a joint opposition front. While commentators and Congress leaders themselves show great suspicion about the Trinamool Congress and Mamata Banerjee, in power in West Bengal, and K Chandrasekhar Rao, who leads the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, that is in power in Telangana. Both these state satraps speak of a federal front minus the Congress, which does not seem a feasible possibility.

Yet, the truth is that there are actually more territorial problems with the Left as in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, and to an extent even Telangana, the Congress has stopped being a weighty player. Simultaneously, having lost in West Bengal and Tripura, the Left is only in power in Kerala even as its national tally has collapsed to a dismal three Lok Sabha seats for the CPI(M) and two Lok Sabha seats for the CPI. Therefore, for both their survival on the national stage, the Congress and the Left have a severe conflict of interest in Kerala. Hence, an editorial from the CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas asked Rahul Gandhi why he was fighting the fight in Kerala. The answer is that it is where there is something left to fight for.

In all fairness to the Congress, there is scope for improvement in its Lok Sabha performance in Karnataka, which has 28 Lok Sabha seats, of which the BJP won 25 and the Congress and JD(S) just one each in the last general election. Again, therefore, the yatra route makes good sense as considerable time will be spent in Karnataka, where the Congress has traditionally had a more diverse and rooted social base than the BJP that came to power in the state after engineering defections from both the Congress and JD(S). Since Karnataka has assembly elections in the first half of 2023, there is again a potential electoral gain here from the yatra passing through and Rahul Gandhi spending time on the ground.

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But then, the larger purpose of the yatra, Congress leaders insist, is not electoral but a sort of renewal at a time the party is confronted with an existential crisis. Available data shows that since 2014, across the states, 553 Congress MLAs and 134 unsuccessful candidates left the party and 233 of them would subsequently win in elections, of which 107 won on the BJP tickets. In a refreshingly candid interview on the Youtube platform SatyaHindi, Jairam Ramesh, now in charge of Congress communications, spoke very candidly about the dilemma confronting a party that was used to being in power and did not have a strategy when out of power. The yatra is obviously an attempt to go to the ground and start up all over again.

No one can fault that, but questions must also be asked about the confusion over leadership and the decaying organisational structures of the party that's always depended on waves to lift it out of the doldrums. Also, the Congress cannot gloss over the fact that the persistent vacillation at the top does not augur well for the country and the entire Opposition. More so when the dominant party of this era, the BJP, has made dynastic politics an issue, and in the Congress party, we have long seen the spectacle of a reluctant dynast.

Perhaps we are at the end of the long wait for a permanent Congress president, but it's still unclear if the matter is fully decided and if Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot has been persuaded to shift to Delhi. It's not been fair to the country that the "To Be or Not To Be" dilemma of Rahul Gandhi has played out for so long. If we go by the words of Jairam Ramesh, Rahul Gandhi would be a 'compass' or a "GPS" that would guide the party. Certainly, the ideological renewal is welcome but there are miles to go before they sleep, both literally and metaphorically.

It is said that in his last few years, India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru kept these lines from Robert Frost's poem framed by his bedside:

The woods are lovely dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to before I sleep.

(Saba Naqvi is a journalist and author)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)