New Delhi: A day before Congress MP Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra kicked off in Manipur in January this year, the party’s general secretary of media and communications and Rajya Sabha MP Jairam Ramesh had said that the procession which was coming just months ahead of the Lok Sabha elections was “not a political but an ideological” one.
“This is not an electoral yatra, it is an ideological yatra. It is a political rally by a political party. There is a political purpose to protect the constitution. But not to discuss seats and impact on seats (for the elections),” he said while addressing reporters in Manipur’s Imphal on January 13.
The yatra got a symbolic start the next day in Thoubal, in the violence-torn state with Gandhi promising to bring peace and listen to the people’s “mann ki baat” – a play on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s radio show of the same name.
While the stated purpose was ideological, through the course of the yatra, Gandhi and the Congress subsequently promised 25 guarantees under five heads of ‘nyay‘ (justice) namely – hissedari (responsibility), naari (women), kisaan (farmers), yuva (youth) and shramik (workers) that will now the form the basis of the party’s 2024 poll manifesto.
The Congress Working Committee (CWC) deliberated thoroughly on the Congress Manifesto, today.
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— Mallikarjun Kharge (@kharge) March 19, 2024
Since its symbolic start in Manipur, much water has flown down the stream of Indian politics for the grand old party. It has lost allies within the INDIA alliance, with its chief architect Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar joining hands with the Bharatiya Janata Party. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has refused to fight the polls with the Congress in the state, while the grand old party has seen a series of desertions to the saffron party including of old timers.
With the 63-day east-to-west yatra – Gandhi’s second mass outreach in a year – ending last week with a show of strength of INDIA leaders, questions remain about its timing, electoral impact, and the very strategy that led the party to launch the yatra in the first place.
Timing
According to Badri Narayan, director, G.B. Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad, the Congress’s loss in the key Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan in the 2023 assembly elections, despite its foregrounding of the promise of a caste census, shows that its social justice plank has not found any takers.
“We have already seen what has happened with the Congress’ social justice promises in the 2023 assembly elections. In my understanding, it is not going to influence the public in a big way,” he said to The Wire.
While the north-south Bharat Jodo Yatra was conducted from October 2022 to January 2023 saw Gandhi undertake a walkathon from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, pitching a message of “jodo” or unity against BJP’s divisive politics and preaching “mohabbat” or love, the second instalment rechristened as the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra was mostly conducted by bus.
The party said that the decision to undertake the yatra by bus was mostly due to time constraints. But it limited the yatra’s mass reach – the very factor that saw a resurgent Gandhi and a re-energised Congress in January 2023. Months after the four-month long yatra, the party saw dividends in its victory in the Karnataka assembly elections, which in turn cascaded onto Telangana elections in December 2023.
The Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra on the other hand was an east-to-west yatra that went from Manipur to Mumbai and covered 6,700 km touching 110 districts, 100 Lok Sabha seats, and 337 assembly constituencies in what was touted as the biggest mass outreach ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.
But the party’s decision to undertake the yatra, just months ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, even as seat sharing arrangements were not sealed with alliance partners was criticised by members of the INDIA alliance. By the end of the first month of the yatra, the TMC had announced that it would go solo in West Bengal, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) announced its own solitary act in Punjab, the JD(U) had rejoined hands with the NDA, National Conference chief Farooq Abdullah said that his party would contest the Lok Sabha elections alone, while Jayant Chaudhary of the RLD went to the NDA fold.
Days before the Yatra entered Gujarat, former state unit chief Arjun Modhwadia too jumped ship to the saffron party. In Maharashtra former chief minister Ashok Chavan left to join the BJP and old timer Milind Deora, the Shiv Sena’s Eknath Shinde faction.
Though the party managed to seal a deal with the AAP for Delhi, and with the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, and is giving final touches with the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray) and NCP in Maharashtra, and RJD in Bihar, it has also seen desertions in other state units like Assam-where the Yatra saw a head-on collision with the Himanta Biswa Sarma led BJP government.
“The timing was wrong. They should have been organising the INDIA alliance properly. This was the time when they should have worked on building the alliance’s chemistry. But instead of doing that they started their Yatra,” said Narayan.
“They could have done it earlier if they had to or even later. Secondly, the strategy itself was wrong. If the strategy was to win elections, then elections require mobilisation. They should have worked on INDIA alliance’s chemistry and taken out the yatra together that would have had a collective impact.”
“It was not well planned, well organised, the messaging was not clear, the planning was not there, and most importantly collective unity was missing. If you are going to fight elections together, you cannot continue doing your politics separately. What impact can that have?”
The curtains fell on the Yatra with a show of strength of sorts in Mumbai with a host of INDIA party leaders including NCP (SP) president Sharad Pawar, Shiv Sena (UBT) president Uddhav Thackeray, DMK leader and Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin, Abdullah, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti and AAP MLA Saurabh Bharadwaj in attendance.
But the final picture was hardly one reminiscent of the INDIA alliance’s early meetings in Mumbai and Patna when all 26 parties came together promising to fight the BJP together.
Photo: X/@bharatjodo.
Focus on five guarantees
The party has since sought to shift focus on the five guarantees announced during the Yatra. Apart from legalising minimum support price (MSP), and a nationwide caste census, the party’s other guarantees include assurances of a right to apprenticeship, end to paper leaks, filling vacant posts for government jobs, commitment to “jal, jungle, zameen” under Adivasi sankalp in the Hissedari Nyay bracket, and guarantees for women including 50% reservation for them in government jobs, and Rs 1 lakh per year to every woman belonging to poor households, among others.
Two days after the end of Yatra, the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting discussed these guarantees and said that these would foreground its manifesto for the polls, which will be announced in the coming days.
During the CWC meeting, Kharge congratulated Gandhi on his two yatras and said that they were not just “political” marches, but the largest “mass contact movement in our political history”.
Gandhi said that the manifesto itself, which has been given to Kharge for his authorisation, is not merely a document but roadmaps based on dialogue during the Bharat Jodo Yatra and Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra. He added that the party will fight the elections on the agenda of these five Nyay resolutions “which will touch every Indian’s life.”
Electoral impact
Despite the guarantees now being pushed by the Congress, its electoral impact remains under question in the backdrop of its poor performance in the recent assembly elections.
“The job of a political party is to win elections, the job of political leaders is to increase the vote share. The problem with the Bharat Jodo Yatra in both its phases is that it has not been able to increase the vote share substantially,” said Rahseed Kidwai, visiting fellow at the Observer Research Foundation and political commentator to The Wire.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections the Congress won 44 seats with 19.3% vote share. In 2019, when it first brought the idea of Nyay in its manifesto, it bettered its tally to 52 seats but its vote share remained at 19.5%.
“The objective of Bharat Jodo Yatra in both phases would be to support the vote percentage from 19% to somewhere around 25% which would have given it political strength in the elections,” said Kidwai.
“But what we have seen is that in the assembly 2023 elections it did not lead to substantial increase in vote share. So the promises they have made, need to be assessed how much impact it is making electorally.”
While the timing of the Yatra has been questioned, with precious political time being lost, ahead of the assembly elections when the Congress was focusing on the polls and alliance building had come to a grinding halt, and then the Yatra which saw its fallout with the alliance unravelling, the challenge remains in direct contests with the BJP.
In at least 200-odd Lok Sabha seats, most of them in north India, down to a straight contest between the BJP and the Congress.
“When Congress becomes closer to 100 seats, there is a reduction in BJP seats. Its allies are capable – the RJD, Uddhav Thackeray faction, and even Samajwadi Party to challenge the BJP and take some seats. But it is the direct contests where Congress’ strike rate is poor and that poses a challenge,” said Kidwai.
