Congress leader Rahul Gandhi will undertake a 6,200km-long Bharat Nyay Yatra from the northeastern tip of India to its western shore between January and March, the party announced on Wednesday, in what is a reiteration of a Kanyakumari-to-Kashmir Bharat Jodo foot march that galvanised workers but produced mixed electoral dividends.
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Congress general secretary KC Venugopal said the yatra will begin on January 14 in violence-torn Manipur and end on March 20 in Mumbai, covering 14 states and 85 districts, largely by bus and on foot, and end just weeks before general elections next summer.
The route will cover Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, Meghalaya, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Nine of these states were not covered in the Bharat Jodo Yatra in 2022-23.
“It will end at Mumbai on March 20,” Venugopal said. Party chief Mallikarjun Kharge will flag off the yatra in Imphal.
Gandhi was under pressure from his party colleagues to undertake another yatra in the last few months. In the last meeting of the Congress Working Committee on December 21, nearly all participants urged the former party chief to undertake another cross-country march on the lines of the 4,500km-long Bharat Jodo Yatra, which began in Kanyakumari in September 2022 and ended in Srinagar on January 30. This time, Gandhi will use a bus for large chunks of the journey instead of walking the whole distance. Gandhi had told them that he would do whatever the party asked him to.
The yatra comes weeks after the Congress suffered a drubbing in three key heartland states, unable to retain its governments in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, and failing to displace the Bharatiya Janata Party in Madhya Pradesh. The party won Telangana in a strong showing but with just months left for the general elections, its poor performance in north India that accounts for at least 225 Lok Sabha seats is a cause of concern.
The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) dismissed the idea. “…Prime Minister Modi has given nyay to the people of India, whereas Congress, on the one hand, campaigned for gareebi hatao [eradicate poverty] but on the other hand, pushed people further into poverty during its regime… These people play divisive politics, they do not know how to bring the nation together…” Union information and broadcasting minister Anurag Thakur said.
The previous Bharat Jodo Yatra was credited for rebooting Gandhi’s image among the common people as he met a raft of ordinary people, social groups, activists, farmers and women. It also helped energise the party cadre in many states where the organisation was moribund.
But the electoral results were mixed — the Congress slumped to its worst defeat in decades in Gujarat, and won a majority of its own in Himachal Pradesh in December 2022. In elections held in 2023, it won the southern states of Karnataka and Telangana, but was wiped out in north India.
Congress leaders said that the Bharat Nyay Yatra was scheduled ahead of the 2024 elections to bolster ground workers. The yatra also assumes importance as the Congress’s previous poll planks — which included welfare schemes, overtures to Hindutva,a nationwide caste census, and the brand of leadership — have failed to win seats in north India, which will be the primary focus of the yatra. Eight of the 14 states to be covered are ruled by the BJP.
“Bharat Nyaya Yatra will end on March 20. This yatra is going to enthuse the youth, women, and all marginalised people,” Venugopal said. Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh announced that the yatra will focus on economic, social, and political justice.
Ramesh also said the Congress will hold a mega rally in Nagpur on December 28 on the occasion of the party’s foundation day. The rally, named ‘Hain Tayyar Hum” (we are ready), will sound the bugle for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
“The Bharat Jodo Yatra of the Indian National Congress led by @RahulGandhi — where he walked from Kanyakumari on September 7th, 2022 till Srinagar on 31st January, 2023—was anchored in our preamble’s pillars of liberty, equality and fraternity…The Bharat Nyay Yatra is anchored in the Preamble’s very first pillar of justice — social, economic and political. The repeated assaults on the Constitution will not be allowed to succeed!” Ramesh later tweeted.
The Congress had initially planned a yatra from Arunachal Pradesh’s Pasighat to Gujarat’s Porbandar. But the ethnic violence in Manipur since May 3 that led to 187 deaths and left around 50,000 people displaced prompted the Congress to change its plan. The Congress and the other Opposition parties had aggressively raised the Manipur issue in Parliament and Union home minister Amit Shah replied to the debate.
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Hailing Manipur as one of the important parts of the North-East, Venugopal said the party wanted to “try to heal the wounds of the state”.
“This is not a political yatra. We are going to raise the issues of the common people. It would not affect the poll preparations. We will have a separate mechanism [for election],” he said.
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