February 22, 2025

Bharat Jodo Yatra 2.0 In The Works

By A Special Correspondent
First publised on 2023-02-27 13:07:21

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The Congress party has, in principle, decided to conduct another yatra. It announced that Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY) 2.0 is under active consideration. This time, the march will be east-to-west and the yatra is likely to start from Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh and end at Porbandar in Gujarat. With this, the party hopes to cover the entire nation in its reaching out to the common man initiative before the 2024 general elections. Obviously, without going into the arithmetic of how the BJY is going to help the party in increasing its vote share by winning over voters, the party is more concerned about spreading its vision of 'inclusive India' to counter the BJP.

There is no doubt the BJY achieved many things. First and foremost, it helped hugely in changing the image of Rahul Gandhi from a reluctant and 'drawing-room' politician to one who was not afraid of hitting the roads to meet people, listen to their problems and tell them about the Congress' vision of inclusive growth. Despite the BJPs attempt to change the narrative by bringing up his expensive t-shirts and shoes, Rahul Gandhi did score innumerable brownie points by undertaking what he has called "a four-month tapasya".

Then, the BJY proved to the BJP as also to doubting Thomases in the opposition and also within the Congress that despite its electoral losses and plummeting vote share, the pan-India infrastructure of the party was intact and so was its capacity and ability to organize an event of such magnitude and that the country was not Congress-mukt, as of now.The yatra also helped to bring Rahul Gandhi closer to the people and the Congress workers. The demoralized Congress workers now have something to talk about when they face the people.

Hence, it is good that the east-to-west leg of the yatra is being planned. Rahul Gandhi now needs to work on the feedback he has received in the first yatra and fine tune his responses when he meets Congress workers and the common people in states like Arunachal, Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha,Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Also, he needs to use the yatra to bring like-minded opposition parties together. That would be a huge achievement.