On Wednesday, the leader of India’s main opposition party will embark on a long march across the country.
Accompanying Rahul Gandhi on the journey to “unite India” will be more than 100 members of his Congress party. It will be a five-month-long, 3,570km (2,218-mile) trek through 12 states. During his journey, Mr Gandhi met people during the day and slept in makeshift accommodations at night. The trek will be live-streamed on a website, and songs will be played, relaying its message.
At its heart, the Bharat Jodo Yatra (Unite India March) is political, targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). “In many ways, we are engaged in an existential struggle to defend the idea of India enshrined in the Constitution. The message [of the march] is that we are the party that can unite India and stop the process of dividing us based on religion, caste and language that the ruling party is promoting,” Shashi Tharoor, a senior Congress leader, told me.
The march is equally an attempt at reviving an exhausted party’s flagging spirits and beefing up its leader’s sagging image. “We are going out to listen to people, not to give them lectures,” Jairam Ramesh, another party leader, said.
Listening to people is always a good idea. Since 2014, when Mr Modi swept to power in India, the Congress has been in free-fall. It has been routed by the BJP in two successive federal elections and has lost 40 of 45 state elections. The party now rules in a paltry two states, and is stricken by dissent.
It is unclear what the Congress – which has lost most of its traditional voters to the BJP – stands for, apart from a vision of a secular India. Mr Gandhi himself has often appeared to be a reluctant leader.
Resurrecting Congress against a fiercely combative and resource-rich opponent like the BJP will not be easy. Many believe that a march like this can become the centrepiece of a countrywide movement against the government only if a popular leader leads it.
There is still no evidence that Mr Gandhi is popular: a new opinion poll showed only 9% of the 120,000-odd respondents preferred him as the next prime minister, compared with more than half for Mr Modi. “No public campaign can succeed without its leader having a basic modicum of credibility. In two decades, Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly demonstrated a total lack of connection with the public. He has not a shred of credibility left,” Baijayant Jay Panda, a national vice-president of BJP, told me.
The party hopes the march will help repair Mr Gandhi’s image. Zoya Hasan, a political scientist who has written extensively about the Congress, said the long march looked like a bid to “relaunch” him as a national leader. “A focus on uniting people at a time when Indian society is hugely polarised is a compelling message and should be welcomed by all,” she says.
Yet the recent history of long marches in India presents mixed results.
In 1983, opposition leader Chandra Shekhar, embarked on a six-month-long, 4,000km countrywide trek to showcase himself as a grassroots leader. People called the 56-year-old politician the “marathon man”. But the march didn’t fetch him any political dividends. The next year, the Congress won a landslide riding on a sympathy wave following the assassination of PM Indira Gandhi.
BJP leader LK Advani undertook a more significant countrywide trek that changed Indian politics in 1990. He planned a 10,000km journey in a mini-truck, which looked like a chariot, from the ancient temple town of Somnath in the west to Ayodhya in the north. This was to whip up support for a campaign to build a temple on the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. (Its destruction led to some of the deadliest religious violence in India’s history.)
Barely a month after he started, Mr Advani’s trip was halted and he was arrested by a political rival, Lalu Prasad Yadav, who ruled in the eastern state of Bihar. Mr Yadav said he had done this to “save humanity”. Mr Advani’s journey was to become a significant milestone in putting the BJP’s agenda of cultural nationalism at the centre of his party’s programme.
