New Delhi: Congress' 3500 km long 'Bharat Jodo Yatra' taking off from Kanyakumari in Tamilnadu on September 7 with Rahul Gandhi at its helm intends to listen to the people’s voice instead of throwing a monologue at them.
Countering Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Mann Ki Baat', Rahul, during his 150-day-long walk from Kanyakumari to Kashmir with 118 fellow Bharat Yatris, will hear “Jann ki baat”, a campaign where people will have the opportunity to speak to him directly. "The yatra will be an opportunity to hear from the people what their issues are,” AICC Secretary in charge of organization JD Seelam told ETV Bharat.
Accordingly, the yatra planners have kept two slots during which the Bharat yatris will walk 3-4 hours in the morning and 3-4 hours in the evening per day. The morning schedule would cover around 15 km and would be utilized for interacting with the locals, listening to their problems, and trying to find out possible solutions. The evening schedule would be around 8 km and would be utilized for mass mobilization and would involve larger gatherings of around 20000 people where meetings with local communities would take place and Rahul may accept some memorandums from the public.
The Wayanad MP has conducted several yatras in the past, including the three-day foot march from village Bhatta-Parsaul in Greater Noida to Aligarh in western Uttar Pradesh over land acquisition issues. During the entire stretch, Rahul, who was then an AICC general secretary, interacted with the farmers to understand their issues related to the takeover of agricultural land by the government.
In the subsequent years, Rahul played a key role in the drafting of the Land Acquisition Bill, which became a law in 2013 when the Congress-led UPA was in power. In 2016, ahead of the 2017 UP assembly polls, Rahul undertook the Kisan yatra from Deoria in the east to Ghaziabad in the west to drum up support for the party in the hinterlands of the important state. Most of the stretch was covered in a bus and the yatra went through several phases.
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“The Kisan yatra had generated a huge support base for the party but our alliance with the SP before the polls diluted its impact,” UP Congress leader Pradeep Jain, a former junior minister in the UPA, said.
The party has been carrying out the Rajiv Jyoti Sadbhavna yatras over the past years against alleged communal polarization. Not only that, Rahul also undertook personal yatras where he walked the entire stretches to well-known shrines like Kedarnath in Uttarakhand, Vaishno Devi in Jammu and Kashmir, and Mount Kailash in China.
But no Yatra can match the scale and the magnitude of Bharat Jodo yatra as it will move through 12 states and 2 UTs to cover around 3500 km. According to political observers Congress which had lost the 2014 and the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and lost a series of state elections since then, the yatra is an attempt to revive nationally ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
“In the states, through which the Bharat yatra is not passing, state unit chiefs have been asked to conduct district level 75 km yatras to connect with the people during the next few months,” Congress communications in-charge Jairam Ramesh said.
According to the AICC general secretary in charge of Maharashtra HK Patil, the yatra would charge up the party workers who will feel involved in the mass contact program. For the record the party says that the yatra is going to be a social project but the kind of planning and mobilization that is happening for the mega event shows that it would have political overtones as well.
Before the official launch on Wednesday, the party has started circulating small video clips over the intent of the yatra in which issues like price rise and unemployment also figure beside the stated need for uniting the country against divisive forces.
In the past, the Congress had been slamming the Centre over the issues of price rise, GST and unemployment and it is likely that they will find mention during the foot march. “We are a political party after all. We are the main opposition party. If we don’t launch public agitations, who will,” wondered veteran Digvijay Singh, who is coordinating the nationwide yatra.
