New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi will lead a two-month “Bharat Nyay Yatra” from January in a reprise of his previous south-to-north walkathon last year, to carry the promise of “social, economic and political justice” to the people, the party announced Wednesday.
This yatra will be from east to west — from Manipur to Maharashtra — beginning 14 January and ending on 20 March, just months before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Unlike the “Bharat Jodo Yatra” last year, when Gandhi walked the majority of the 4,080-kilometre distance on foot, this journey will mostly be via bus, keeping the paucity of time in mind as elections will be just around the corner.
The march will be flagged off by Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge in Imphal, the capital of strife-torn Manipur. It will culminate in Mumbai on 20 March, covering 85 districts in 14 states and spanning 6,200 km.
From Manipur, the yatra will enter Nagaland, and go on to cover Assam, Meghalaya, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra.
The Congress is part of the ruling alliance in two of these 14 states, Bihar and Jharkhand. West Bengal is governed by the Trinamool Congress, a constituent of the Opposition’s INDIA bloc.
Of the rest, as many as 10 states are ruled by BJP and its allies and Odisha by the Biju Janata Dal, with the BJP being the principal Opposition.
These 14 states account for 355 Lok Sabha seats.
Congress general secretary (communications in-charge) Jairam Ramesh said Wednesday that this yatra was for economic, social and political justice. “Indian democracy has to be saved. The Constitution has to be saved. Crores of families struggling with unemployment and inflation need to be shown a bright future,” Ramesh said.
He added that the Bharat Jodo Yatra had been undertaken to “unite” the people of the country, but the Bharat Nyay Yatra would be an attempt to instil confidence among people that the Congress “will ensure justice for them”.
The 4,000-km-long Bharat Jodo Yatra — from 7 September, 2022 to 30 January, 2023 — saw Gandhi walk from Kanyakumari to Srinagar, covering 12 states and 2 Union territories from the country’s southern coast to the Valley.
While the thrust of Gandhi’s previous cross-country march was on communal harmony, the Congress has tweaked the theme of the upcoming Bharat Nyay Yatra to focus more on “bread and butter” issues with an eye on the polls.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha election campaign, the Congress had promised a minimum income guarantee scheme called NYAY (Nyuntam Aay Yojana).
Congress general secretary (organisation) K.C. Venugopal said Wednesday, “We have chosen to embark on a bus yatra because it will allow more access to people on the way. But it will also have short stretches of walking every now and then. The Congress party is expecting that the Bharat Nyay Yatra will be historic.”
He added, “We are not going to make it a political yatra or an election yatra. We are going to raise issues for the common people of the country.” Venugopal also stressed the yatra would not affect the party’s election management.
At the Congress Working Committee meeting last week, Kharge had proposed that Gandhi take out another yatra.
Incidentally, several party leaders had credited the party’s victory in the Karnataka assembly elections earlier this year to Gandhi’s first mass outreach yatra. The party, however, was decisively defeated by the BJP just months later in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The first two were covered in the first yatra.
(Edited by Tikli Basu)