Counting milestones: A day in the life of the Bharat Jodo Yatra

The sun has not yet risen on a cold December morning, and most of the villages that lie on the meandering road around Ranthambore Tiger Reserve are still engulfed in the winter silence. Except Jeenapur, which, even at 5.45am, is abuzz. On both sides of a small lane, beneath a temporary arch, are rows and rows of people – in monkey caps, shawls, mufflers, rubbing their hands together to keep themselves warm. As 6am approaches, the road is a beehive of frantic activity. White SUVs, sporting numbers that can only mean they belong to the administration or political leaders, speed this way and then the other. Hapless policemen urge, coax and yell at bystanders to clear the path. Then, at the dot of 6, the crowd erupts, spotting something in the darkness. Speakers begin to blare AR Rahman’s rendition of “Vande Mataram”, and as fireworks brighten the dark sky, they light up the text on the temporary arch – “Bharat Jodo Yatra”.

The first bunch is disciplined, even sombre, and is allowed the luxury of walking in a small group of about a hundred people. At its head, in a blue sweater over his white kurta, is 68-year-old Rajya Sabha MP Jairam Ramesh. Next to him is a man in a Congress Seva Dal cap, carrying the Tricolour. They walk quickly, Ramesh waving to the crowd every now and again. Next to him, the flag keeps switching hands. Every time it does, the man holding it stands to attention, saluting in one quick motion, before surrendering it to the next. In less than a minute, the group has passed by – its understatedness a far cry from what is to follow.

From afar, it looks like the beginning of a storm.

Hundreds of frantic feet are kicking up dust, and the tarred lane is unable to hold the numbers on it. First there is a marching band, then a media van, then a ring of security guards holding a thick rope in a bid to separate the man in the centre from the crowds rushing towards him. To his right, armed clasped behind his back, is Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot. To his left is Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. In a flash of chaos, his hands raised in acknowledgement at those that line the road, in a now ubiquitous white t-shirt, a bearded Rahul Gandhi walks past. His pace is furious; those that walk behind him, eager to be caught in the same camera frame, jostling, tripping, struggling to keep up. It is 6.15am, and there are 27 kilometres to go. Day 97 of an exercise that believers see as the Congress’s road to eventual electoral redemption, and the non-believers as a detour to electoral irrelevance, has just begun.

Just keep walking

On Friday, the yatra entered its 100th day. And through these 100 days, beginning from Kanyakumari and snaking its way through seven states to Rajasthan, the pattern has been much the same. The day begins at 4am, when a makeshift camp constructed in a clearing, covered in white tarpaulin, begins to stir. Some emerge from containers converted into living quarters; others throw off blankets from bedding laid in rows on the ground. There are 120 to 150 “Bharat Yatris” walking the length of the 3,500km from Kanyakumari to Srinagar over 150 days; others are “pradesh yatris”, supporters and leaders from the state the yatra is currently in. By 5am, breakfast is served, and by 5.30am the Tricolour is hoisted, marking a formal beginning to the day.

At 6 am, they begin to walk.

The distances for the day vary; but they are rarely, if ever, under 20km. On Tuesday, the distance from Jeenapur, where the yatra began, to Dubbi Banas, where it ended, was 27km in all. Fourteen of those kilometres are traversed in the first four hours, with a 15-minute pause for tea. On most days arrive guests of the yatra – from musician TM Krishna to economist Raghuram Rajan – to walk with Rahul Gandhi. Often, Gandhi will point to someone in the crowd – a child, a group of women, or someone just waving enthusiastically to him – and call them inside the cordon. The yatra comes to a standstill briefly as Gandhi speaks to them, taking a photograph, before it sets off again.

By 10am, the walking group reaches a scheduled resting stop with two separate camps. Camp 1 houses the Bharat Yatris, and the party’s senior leadership. Camp 2, the pradesh (state) yatris. The first has one tent that serves lunch, and rows and rows of cots with mattresses. Some take the opportunity to rest, others tend to injuries exacerbated by the days of walking. It is much the same in the second camp, except, instead of cots, there are mattresses with white sheets laid out on the ground.

In the five-and-a-half hours that the yatra halts, scheduled events don’t. Every day, generally around 11am, the party’s senior leadership holds a press conference. There is also nearly always an interaction with a group that has sought Gandhi’s time. On Tuesday, for instance, it was a group of Dalit activists from Rajasthan.

By 3.30pm, the raucous caravan begins again, and by 6 in the evening, all 27km are done. Only to begin again before sunrise the next day.

The reconnection

The Congress announced the Bharat Jodo Yatra in May 2022 during its three day “chintan shivir” in Udaipur, held in the backdrop of a party mired in internal dissonance, losing electoral ground to both the BJP and regional forces. In his speech when it was announced, Gandhi said that the Congress needed to accept that it had lost its connection with the public, and that the relationship could not be strengthened without hard work and sweat.

The messages that the Congress seeks to deliver – on posters that dot every square metre, or in speeches that blare out through speakers along the route – are not particularly new. That the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is seeking to spread “nafrat”(hatred) is not an unfamiliar line from the party. Neither are issues of unemployment, or its often-stated stance of growing inequality. The difference, party leaders point out, is in the delivery of the message: the yatra.

Rafique Khan, a Jaipur Congress MLA who says he helped with the yatra when it passed through Kota on December 8, pointed to a greasing of the organisational wheels. “When something of this scale is organised, the entire party machinery gets involved. I spoke to district secretaries, ward level leaders to get things in order. They spread the message of the yatra to the people, and suddenly the sangathan is busy and involved. This must be happening at every location, every state and is particularly useful in a state that goes to elections in less than a year,” Khan said.

Except Gandhi himself has sought to distance the yatra from electioneering, a sentiment reinforced by the fact that it skipped Gujarat altogether (and his own near-invisibility in his party’s Gujarat campaign). All similar exercises – LK Advani’s Rath Yatra in 1990; YS Rajasekhara Reddy’s padayatra in 2003 – were linked to elections. The first made the BJP the second largest party in the Lok Sabha (by seats) in 1991; the second brought Reddy and the Congress to power in Andhra Pradesh in 2004.

The yatra is perhaps the first time in several decades the party rank and file has spent days on end together, but the impact of this isn’t clear. And while the yatra attracts crowds, these need to be seen in the light of the 120 million votes the party received in the 2019 election. Attracting crowds has never been a challenge for the party or Gandhi. In recent years, winning elections has been.

But the yatra’s appeal to the faithful is evident.

During the recess at Camp 1 away from the madding crowds that prevent any conversation outside, there is the constant murmur of conversation. At one end is the 88-year-old Karuna Prasad Mishra who walks with a stick in his hand, refusing calls by his family to return to his home town of Siddhi in Madhya Pradesh. “They even came to get me, but I told them to go back. In 1961, Pandit Nehru himself made me join the Congress. Now that the party is reclaiming the narrative, I will not step away,” he says.

In another corner is SS Kim from the Manipur Congress, limping from a leg she fractured in Tamil Nadu, but soldiering on nonetheless. In another corner, besieged by questions of his walking the length of the gruelling yatra barefoot, is Congress training in charge Sachin Rao. “For such a sustained period, for everyone to live together, eat together, and walk together, is a bigger party building exercise than ever before,” one party leader said.

The Rahul factor

It is 8.30am, and in the village of Karmoda, Ramesh Prasad Meena is serving tea, his eyes constantly on the road. It is one room of his one-floor home that serves as his small shop, and on his roof, are about 50 people who are starting to shout excitedly. “Aa gaye kya (has he come)?” he shouts out to them, preparing to down the shutters in an instant. He is told it is some other leader they don’t recognise, part of the first group that is walking ahead. To the men in his shop he says, “He’ll probably go by in a car. There is no way he has walked this far.” Heads are nodding around him.

But in five minutes, the sounds of the marching band and the Congress and India flags that surround Gandhi’s posse arrive in the distance, and Meena rushes up. He spots Gandhi, points and waves. “Chal toh raha hai yaar (He is walking after all),” Meena says.

This may be the Congress’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, but it is actually Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra. He is no longer party president, just a member of Parliament from Wayanad. But is it him that state leaders want to walk with, if just for two minutes. It is him on every poster, and it is him the crowds that line the streets are waiting to see. “For years, he has been accused of being a “Pappu”. This yatra shows that he has the capacity to fight, the capacity to sweat, and the capacity to stick it out. India has historically loved padyatras, and this is the biggest of them all,” one party leader said.

Ideology vs Elections

But it is also clear that the reimagination and the reform of this Congress is beyond the pale of this yatra alone, gruelling though it is. In quiet corners of conversation, there is discomfiture over the de-linking of the yatra to electoral outcomes, the conscious decision to keep it away from Gujarat for instance.

“It would have been very demoralising if the Congress had not won Himachal Pradesh. But all events by political parties must have clear political goals. We know that this (yatra) has no short-term objectives, but there is work to do beyond this to make sure this has a positive impact in 2024, or in the state elections that are coming in the next year,” a senior leader said, asking not to be named. On December 4, Congress general secretary KC Venugopal announced a follow up campaign to the yatra, “Haath se Haath Jodo”, which will last for two months, and have padyatras at the block level.

There is also criticism that the design of the campaign leaves Gandhi very little time to interact with the people lining up to see him. Along the road, there are groups wanting to garland him, small stages constructed in the hope that he will stop and converse. But Gandhi usually walks past in a flash, the distance that must be covered, and the inevitable concerns of security, militating against conversation.

As Ramesh Prasad Meena steps off his terrace, he is asked with a tinge of disappointment by one of the onlookers: “Did you see him? I couldn’t even spot him properly.”

“I saw him. Election toh baad mein honge lekin mehnat toh manni padegi. Kuch toh kar rahe hai (Elections can come later, but you have to respect his hard work. At least they are doing something).”

The party may say it doesn’t really care, but deep down it must be hoping that some of that appreciation translates into votes.