Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra: Doomed in the Congress drawing room

Saul Bellow’s description of a wrecking ball, considered one of the finest pieces of descriptive prose, resonates with the latest wrecking ball that the remnants of the Congress party has been smashed with: Ghulam Nabi Azad. And to borrow from Bellow, the present continuous tense state of the Congress resembles the picture he draws: “the old flooring burned gratefully — the funeral of exhausted objects.”

But this is not an essay on literature. It is also not about Ghulam Nabi Azad, at least not entirely. It is about a pet peeve of his which he has been hammering hard hoping that it holds like a nail in public memory. In interview after unceasing interview since he quit the Congress, he has been mocking the Bharat Jodo Yatra (Unite India Rally) planned by his former party. His jibe being that it should be renamed as Congress Jodo Yatra (Unite Congress Rally), and his reasoning seems sound. To paraphrase Azad, “The last I heard, no state was seceding from India, so what is this Bharat Jodo Yatra all about?”

The last time a yatra was held in Bharat, it brought the Congress crashing down, and with it the greatest barrier to the Sanatana civilisational reclamation after Independence was ground to dust. That was the Ramajanmabhoomi Yatra, arguably one of the greatest socio-cultural-civilisational epochs in world history. Sri Rama’s name — not even his temple — united Bharat and re-educated us with a lesson immediately accessible to us: that our unity and our bonds are forged not by politics or ideology but something that transcends all of these temporal fancies.

Using yatra as a vehicle to attain political ends is a recent phenomenon; it is not even a century old, and the first person to use it politically was Mohandas Gandhi, in his Dandi March. He could harness it because the Hindu in him intuitively understood its timeless appeal with the masses. Like temples, the yatra remains one of the central pillars and profound expressions of Sanatana societal piety. It is eternal, like Sanatana Dharma and Bharatavarsha itself. And despite the shocking amount of deracination, there is still a substantial chunk of the Hindu society which will give some offering to the yatri (pilgrim).

Gandhi’s transformation of such an exalted spiritual institution into a political tool was repulsive to some sections. But it did have its positives in a limited sense but that is a topic for another day. It can be conjectured that Gandhi took his inspiration from the extraordinary Sanyasi Movement and repurposed it. On one plane, the Sanyasi Movement was a yatra pulsating with the true Sanatana impulse. It was led by renunciates who had waged the freedom struggle in its deepest sense. Its goal was not political but spiritual and Dharmic because its pioneers and leaders lived by the profound Sanatana dictum of Raja Dharmiko Bhooyaat — let the king be an upholder of Dharma, not the upholder of a transitory political office. The Gandhian chasm is clearly visible right here, at the conceptual level.

Given this historical backdrop, one wonders what Bharat Jodo Yatra really intends to achieve. Is it a yatra against Narendra Modi? It certainly appears so given its single-minded obsession with the prime minister both as a person and office-holder. Is it a spurious imitation of the BJP’s Ram Rath Yatra? Even that seems plausible because a few years ago, a viral video showed some Congress workers imitating RSS-style shakhas in a short-lived experiment at trying to beat the enemy by aping him. Or for that matter, Rahul Gandhi’s never-ending trysts with doom that include temple runs (sic), wearing the janaeu, or its latest edition, “becoming” a Lingayat. Which begs the logical question: who or what is Rahul Gandhi when he goes to a mosque or visits a Church? A Lingayat? A Janaeu-dhaari Brahmin? A secularist? An atheist scuba-diver? See how the questions automatically unravel themselves? Or is the Bharat Jodo Yatra a beleaguered leaf taken from the book of the late YS Rajashekhara Reddy whose 2004 Yatra gave such a rich vote-haul for the Congress? Even if it is, look who rules Andhra Pradesh today? The son of the self-same Reddy who has wiped out his late father’s party in the state by going independent.

The speculative possibilities are endless. Rahul Gandhi needs to be accountable to what he thundered just a few months ago: That India is not a single nation but a “union of states”. Even if we hypothetically admit that this shocking nonsense is actually true, the question arises: If India is a union, what is Rahul Gandhi trying to “Jodo” with his yatra?

History — specifically, the history of the Nehru dynasty after 1947 — is the surest proof that India has survived as a united and independent sovereignty despite the colossal damage that successive Congress governments have inflicted. It was under Congress governments that various secessionist movements erupted with alarming regularity — the Naxals, Maoists, virulent Tamil separatist movements, the Khalistanis, and countless insurgencies in the North East. That covers about 60 percent of the whole Indian landmass. It is also now well-known that Congress leaders funded and/or orchestrated several of these dangerous eruptions. Let’s not forget who created the Frankenstein named Bhindranwale.

So what exactly is Bharat Jodo Yatra then? Perhaps only Rahul Gandhi — or his “advisors” — can enlighten us. Or perhaps he can’t. Its political facet is undoubtedly a preparation for the 2024 general elections, an event which will probably witness its extinction. Its former “heavyweight” leaders are not only quitting in droves but are damaging it on an unprecedented scale by making damning revelations. Among others, a consistent — and almost unanimous — revelation is the massive erosion of its ground workers.

Perhaps Rahul Gandhi might actually embark on the Bharat Jodo Yatra, but where will he get the crowds from?

The author is founder and chief editor, ‘The Dharma Dispatch’. Views expressed are personal.

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