Following infighting, resignations and huge losses in general as well as state elections, the Congress party has announced its longest foot rally in years – the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’. Congress has already revealed the pamphlets, logo, and dedicated a website to the political rally. The party has also released the list of leaders who will be joining the ‘yatra’.

The 3,500-km rally will be led by All India Congress Committee head Rahul Gandhi. The goal of the yatra is to discuss national issues like inflation, unemployment, social tensions and threats to democracy. The yatra will move through Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, and Jammu.

The grand-old party has also released the list of its stops during the massive rally – Kochi and Palakkad, Coimbatore, Mysore and Bellary, Alur, Vikarabad, Nanded and Jalgaon Jamod, Indore and Ujjain, Kota, Dausa, Alwar, Bulandshahar, Delhi, Ambala, Pathankot, Jammu and finally coming to an end in Srinagar.

The rally is slated to start on the evening of September 7 from Gandhi Mandapam in Kanyakumari. Among the pitstops is the Sriperumbudur memorial, the site of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. The Wayanad MP will also be visiting his father’s memorial.

Despite the upcoming elections in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, the ‘yatra’ would be skipping thee states. The party has instead decided to stick to its remaining strongholds to present a united front even as leaders continue to exit.

Tamil Nadu and Kerala, in particular, remain strong bastions for Congress. The party won 15 seats in Kerala and eight seats in Tamil Nadu in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. With the two states contributing 23 out of the 52 seats that the INC won in total, the party’s pit stops in the southern states were almost guaranteed. Gandhi’s current status as the elected representative of Wayanad, Kerala, also contributes to the matter. Gandhi had lost the Nehru-Gandhi bastion of Amethi, Uttar Pradesh, in 2019.

Stops in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh can be seen through a lens of solidifying support with non-BJP supporting voting blocs as the saffron party still hasn’t managed to crack the two states. Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy’s Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party (YSRCP) had won the most number of seats in Andhra Pradesh in 2019, while Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao’s Telangana Rashtra Samithi was the biggest winner in Telangana.

The recent political turmoil in Maharashtra along with the state being the third most populous in the country may have been a factor in the state being included in the yatra. Nanded was the home seat of high-profile congress leader Ashok Shankarrao Chavan, though he had lost from the seat in 2019 against BJP’s Prataprao Govindrao Chikhalikar. The yatra would need to cross through the state anyway to move northwards as well.

Madhya Pradesh had handed 28 seats to the BJP and only one for the INC in 2019, but just a year ago, the INC had emerged as the largest party and even formed the state government in the 2018 assembly elections. A large number of defections in 2020 caused the Kamal Nath government to be toppled however.

While the INC won no seats in Rajasthan, the party does control the state government under Ashok Gehlot. Kota being the seat of Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla can be a reason for the city’s inclusion in the yatra. Though Uttar Pradesh today is a bastion of BJP, the INC under Priyanka Gandhi wants to shift the power dynamics in the state.

Delhi had long been a stronghold for the INC under former Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, and Punjab and Haryana were under the influence of the Hooda family.

First Published:Sept 4, 2022 8:30 AM IST