In ancient India, warriors crossed the country on horseback or on chariots. Merchants travelled by bullock cart. Brides went to their new homes in palanquins. Holy men and women, however, engaged in 'padayatra'- journeys by foot, which had a symbolic and sacerdotal meaning. In most monastic sects- Jain or Hindu- monks are supposed to travel only by foot. Unfortunately, this may have contribute to the notion that it is impious to cross 'the black water'- i.e. oceanic travel involved loss of caste or religious status.
In modern Indian politics, Mahatma Gandhi- an indefatigable walker- popularized the padayatra as a method of galvanizing support and breaking down the barrier between the towns and the rural areas, not to mention other social and economic barriers between the people of India. However, it must be said, Gandhi's Salt March was a failure. Under Nehru, the salt tax repealed by Liaquat, was reintroduced. Similarly, Gandhi's great disciple, Vinobha Bhave's padayatras- which were concerned with getting landlord to voluntarily hand over farm land to the poor- failed. 'Bhoodhan' was a gimmick not a panacea.
Older people like me recall Chandra Shekhar's padayatra in 1983. It may have reinforced his claim to be an all-India politician but his spell as Prime Minister was utterly undistinguished. Since then, the padayatra has come to symbolize a desperate gamble by an ambitious but useless fellow. True, a provincial politician- e.g. YSR and his son- may increase his grip on his own state by going walkabout but no higher value is served by this sort of PR exercise.
What of Rahul's 'Unite India' padayatra? It appears bizarre. Rahul is saying he won't be the leader even of his own party. It is welcome to unite or fall apart faster without him. As for India itself- Rahul believes it is not a nation. It is a union- like the European Union. But this means there can be Brexits aplenty.
Writing for Print.in, Vir Sanghvi takes a different view-
It’s time to give credit where credit is due. No matter what you think of Rahul Gandhi’s record as Congress president and later as president-by-stealth, it is hard to deny what a stupendous achievement his Bharat Jodo Yatra is.
Money has been spent on it. This is Rahul's farewell tour. It may be that with the dynasty out of the picture, a 'Janata Parivar' candidate will challenge the 'Sangh Parivar's' Modi. In other words, with Congress taking a backseat, the two wings of the Janata Morcha which held power between 1977 and 1980 will duke it out with the RSS wing prevailing thanks to its superior cohesiveness.
It began on 7 September and will take 150 days to complete. Rahul is walking for 3,570 km from Kanyakumari to Kashmir entirely on foot.
With him, a dynasty which originated in Kashmir will evacuate the space it carved for itself in Indian politics. But this is also the death knell for the role played by the English speaking Indian upper middle class. It is literally walking out of History.
So far, the yatra has been a huge success.
People are glad to see the backs of the descendants of 'the last Englishman to rule India'. When the Brits departed in 1947, they too were given a rapturous send-off.
Rahul has not travelled through any Congress-ruled state (he is yet to reach Rajasthan) but nearly everywhere he has gone, he has attracted huge crowds.
Kanyakumari has a large Christian population, as has Kerala. But Rahul has angered the CPM in Kerala. They will attack careerist Lefties who had hitched their wagon to a shooting star.
His speeches have been widely appreciated and on one celebrated occasion, a crowd sat through a rainstorm to hear him speak.
Because he was speaking a language they didn't understand. Still, with Kharge- who is from Karnataka- as Sonia's choice for President of Congress- there would be some enthusiasm for Rahul in Mysuru. The problem is that the BJP is sticking with Bommai while Congress may once again have a big internal squabble over their CM face for the 2023 polls. Kharge may be able to handle things cleverly- but what if the Gandhis remain as backseat drivers?
Rahul's bigger problem is retaining a seat in Parliament. The question is whether CPM cadres can get their revenge by getting Rahul's voters to turn against him. We may be seeing the beginning of the Left putting clear blue water between itself and Congress. But what ideological space can the latter then occupy?
In Karnataka, where the BJP government is shaky, the yatra has worked to galvanise pro-Congress sentiment.
Karnataka is indeed very important. The problem is that whether or not Rahul has really converted to the Lingayat sect, Bommai is actually Lingayat. Kharge is Dalit. It appears Kharge supports Siddaramiah over D.K Shivakumar. If the two can't pull along whereas BSY and Bommai stand together then the caste arithmetic doesn't add up even if Christians and Muslims vote for Congress. But why would they? What can Congress deliver?
Early indications are that the yatra has also enthused the party’s cadres on the ground.
Money has been spent. Publicity has been arranged. Twitter has already responded favorably to rising stars like Dr. Shama Mohamed. But what if she is poached by some other party?
But more importantly, it has given people a chance to see the real Rahul Gandhi, not the caricature created by the BJP and featured on TV news and social media.
The real Rahul Gandhi can walk. He can also talk. But he can't walk the talk. Thus he is walking out of Indian politics. People cheer him on his way.
And by walking the whole way, Rahul has drawn on a very Indian theme: the leader who walks among his people.
but who says he won't lead shit. He and his family won't preside over Congress. Let someone else take the blame for its demise.
This is not the sort of leader who lands by helicopter after thousands of policemen have secured the area.
Because this is not a leader. He could have become a Cabinet Minister in 2004 when he was the same age as Bilawal Bhutto is now. Bilawal has made a good impression as Pakistan's new Foreign Minister,
By contrast, Obama said 'Rahul Gandhi has 'a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who'd done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject'. Obama is only 9 years older than Rahul. Yet, to him, Rahul came across as an adolescent. The truth is, Rahul could have held Cabinet Posts. He could have run the Commonwealth Games as his father had managed the Asian games. He could have become Prime Minister and led his party to victory in 2014. But he wouldn't step up to the plate. This was not a student who hadn't 'mastered the subject'. This was a work-shy guy in his forties who would neither provide leadership nor allow anyone else to do so.
His speeches seem to come from the heart and are devoid of any agenda:
or intelligence. In Mysusru, he said 'Like a river, this yatra will flow from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.
Because rivers flow from the sea to the mountains- right?
Neither storm nor rain or cold weather will stall its flow.
Because rivers flow uphill. They don't turn into glaciers when they reach cold mountains.
This river-like journey will persist and in this river you will not find any trace of hate or violence.
Except hate for the BJP. The problem is that if you really hate the Sangh Parivar so much, you must make common cause with the Left and the Janata Parivar. A river which flows uphill can't unite anything. It is merely being pumped up with money- but that money will run out.
There will only be love and brotherhood as this is India's history and DNA
Rahul does have one quarter Indian DNA. He has half Italian DNA while his paternal ancestors came from Iran.
there are no elections in most of these states so he is not there to simply win votes.
He is there to say goodbye to Indian politics. The fear is he will remain as a back-seat driver.
When I see footage of Rahul Gandhi walking in the rain or stopping to speak to the people who line the streets, I am always hit by the same thought: why have we not seen this Rahul earlier? This is a Rahul that India can relate to.
Had we seen this Rahul earlier, the fellow would have been forced to take the top job. He didn't want it. Now he is saying goodbye, he is letting us know that he could have succeeded as his father succeeded. But he didn't want to meet the same end as Daddy and Granny and that Mahatma dude with the same surname as him. This is perfectly understandable.
Instead, Rahul has wasted the last several years trying to do jobs he was not cut out for, and coming across as entitled in the process.
The plain fact is Rahul was given jobs and showed he couldn't do them. Now, at the age of 52, he is retiring. Let Congress either fix itself or just die already.
First of all, he should have served under Manmohan Singh in UPA 2, and humbly submitted himself to the Prime Minister’s will.
That PM had no will. Still, Sonia should have forced Rahul to get on-the-job training. He'd have read out speeches from time to time and been photographed with world leaders. Sooner of later, he'd have found his own Ahmed Patel and other such helpers. But he was determined to mess up because he just didn't want to be in this particular industry.
Instead, he became an alternative power centre, even going so far as to talk about tearing up an ordinance that the Cabinet had passed.
Manmohan asked Montek if he should resign. Had Rahul wanted the top job, Manmohan would have gone gracefully. But Rahul didn't want it. His temper tantrum was just that- a tantrum. He wanted power without the responsibility- the traditional prerogative of, not just the harlot, but the playboy too.
He was right about the ordinance but wrong to have undermined the Prime Minister by rubbishing it in public. It fed perfectly into the narrative which the BJP had created about his sense of entitlement.
No. Had Rahul taken the top job, the BJP would have put up Advani- who was twice Rahul's age. Congress would have romped home. True, like Rajiv, Rahul's government may have been pulled down by corruption and internal dissension. But once you have been PM, you have gravitas. You have credibility. People say 'he has learnt from his mistakes'. Congress would have a PM candidate. It would not have been a case of 'Modi or nobody'.
On the other hand, it is true that Rahul did become Congress President and people were initially quite hopeful about his prospects in 2019. That was the debacle Singhvi needs to explain.
Then, he took a job he was no good at. History has taught us that if you don’t understand how to run an organisation you can never be a good Congress president.
Not really. You can delegate. Who was Rahul's Ahmed Patel?
Rahul had the right ideas: holding elections for party posts, reviving the youth Congress, and rebuilding the party cadres in Uttar Pradesh from scratch.
These are ideas. But they weren't right for Congress. Only one thing mattered. Getting a Chanakya for the Yuvaraj. Rahul wanted to get rid of Patel and the machine he represented. But he could put nothing in its place. Why? I suppose there is an inside story here which, alas!, nobody will now want to hear.
But it rapidly became clear that as good as those ideas were, he could never manage to implement them. He should have accepted that, stepped aside and let somebody else run the party, even if he continued to be one of its primary faces.
This appears to be the root of the problem. Congress gains when leaders surnamed Gandhi are assassinated. Rahul, quite naturally, wanted to control the machine- not be its sacrificial lamb. But that machine was beyond his grasp. The truth is, it was probably too shitty for anybody to want to touch it save as an act of self-abasement.
His judgements about people were wrong too. It is normal in the Congress to say that the young dynasts who Rahul Gandhi surrounded himself with were only in it for themselves because they all fled and joined the BJP at the first opportunity. Fair enough. But who elevated them to influence?
Singhvi is being silly. Dynasts are 'elevated' by Mummy and Daddy.
It was Rahul’s misjudgements about these people that led to them becoming so important to begin with.
No. The fact that they were dynasts made them important.
One of the reasons Sonia Gandhi, a reticent and introverted person, was able to provide leadership to the party was that she had people like Ahmed Patel to keep in touch with the party. Rahul Gandhi has nobody of consequence. Every Congressperson you talk to will tell you that a) Rahul is inaccessible and b) he is surrounded by incompetents who have hijacked the party. You can’t be an effective party president if that is how you are perceived.
But Rahul stopped being President. Congress's slide accelerated because it no longer had a PM candidate. Instead it was stuck with a moon calf.
Almost everything that Rahul Gandhi is blamed for today stems from his inability to run an organisation.
Nehru could not run an organization. Indira was faced with incessant schisms. Sonia, however, had one great asset. She was the regent of a Crown Prince who would have won if he had taken the top job and gone to the voters promising to be 'Mr. Clean' or 'the voice of Youth' or some such thing. It was only once both Rahul and Priyanka ruled themselves out, that Sonia became a lame duck.
He let the advantage slip away in states such as Gujarat (where the Congress will lose though it once seemed to have had a real chance of winning),
They don't have a CM face. Kejriwal is on a roll- having taken Punjab from Congress. The yatra has taken money and attention away from Gujarat where Congress is seeing defections and in-fighting. If AAP cannibalizes the Congress vote, the party is finished in Gujarat. Another worry is that AIMM may take votes from leaders like Jignesh Mevani. This has much wider implications for ambitious Dalit politicians. It wasn't that long ago that we were all celebrating Channi's elevation to the CM post in Punjab. But, if Congress comes to be seen as unattractive to Muslims, why would Dalits want to join it? They will be welcomed by cannier players.
he misunderstood the nature of Punjab politics and gifted away the state, and the Congress lost Kerala because he could not control infighting.
The nature of politics, like the nature of management, requires you to back the guy you appoint to a post. Don't listen to intrigue against him. True, if you are the 'vote getter' or the one adding most value, then you can afford to be capricious. But Rahul had made himself a laughing-stock rather than a PM candidate. Congress was bound to become more fractious because the dynasty was adding negative value. It may be that sooner rather than later there will be a loose 'Congress parivar' like the 'Janata parivar'. Perhaps Mamta will preside over it. But Kejriwal has his own plans. We can't discount a man who only entered politics ten years ago.
There is also Rahul’s primary failing: his inability to see himself as India sees him.
I wonder if this is so. Rahul appears to lack confidence because he himself feels he is not smart and lacks the killer instinct. To my mind, that makes him a nice guy. I think India, like Obama, sees him as a nice guy who doesn't want to be in politics and has the track-record to prove he should never have been in it in the first place. At the end of his padayatra he may win all hearts by saying 'I'm quitting politics. I will join such and such Ashram or monastic sect. I will pray for all of you. Ta ta.'
It is hard to be objective about yourself when you are surrounded by people who keep telling you that you are a genius.
Sanghvi may know such people. But does Rahul really listen to them?
So Rahul does not seem to recognise that much of India sees him as a dynast with a sense of entitlement and no real achievements to show for himself.
He can walk fast. That's an achievement.
There are successful dynasts in India but they usually have caste or regional bases. There is an obvious conflict between saying you believe in a liberal, meritocratic society and leading a party only because you were born into the job.
No there isn't. Rajiv did it. Sonia, as the 'nation's daughter-in-law' did it. Rahul could have done it. But he didn't bother.
One reason people respect Sonia is because
she was a pativrata- devoted to her husband.
of her refusal to take the party president job in 1991 and then turning down the prime ministership in 2004.
No. People respected her for kicking out the repellent Kesri and husbanding the patrimony of her eldest son. He returned to India in 2002 and, once the Bofors charges were dropped, Sonia moved quickly to assure the Hindus that she and some Shankaracharya would build the Ram Temple if the Courts decided that this could go ahead. In 2004, Rahul was 34. He had been eligible to become PM for 9 years. His father became PM at the age of 40. By contrast, his cousin Varun, became an MP by the age of 29. By 35, he was angling for the CM post in UP. But Rahul's disastrous 2019 campaign affected Varun and his mother adversely. Their role in the BJP is much diminished. There is a theory that Priyanka wanted a humiliated Varun back in Congress. But Maneka, his mother, would have to come as well and Sonia hates her sister-in-law.
Rahul, on the other hand, is the first Gandhi in 60 years to voluntarily and eagerly join politics.
Sanjay and Maneka and Varun eagerly joined politics. Rajiv and Sonia may have been initially reluctant but soon got into the swing of things. Rahul did get elected in 2004. Why did he not take a more active role?
So he needs to show humility and demonstrate that he is more than just the son of his parents.
No he needs to show competence. But first he has to get and keep a political job bigger than just being an MP- which he has been for 18 years. Yogi Adityanath is two years younger than Rahul. He became an MP at the age of 26. Rahul could have entered parliament through a by-election in 1995.
Sadly, he has spent too little time making that clear. Instead, he has played into every cliché of entitlement, keeping people waiting, going off on foreign holidays every few months and acting as though he knows everything.
All of which is fine, if you have held the top job- which Rahul could have done just by demanding it in 2013.
But there is also another Rahul Gandhi: one who is prepared to work hard, to slog it out,
No there isn't. He would not do it when he was 25 or 35 or 44. Now it is too late. He is walking out of Indian political history and people are glad to see him go. After all, he may become a handsome Swamy with a beautiful beard, or he may take up Yoga, or he may set up a Children's Charity or something of that sort. Why not do a Netflix series in which he and Prince Harry take turns interviewing each other and getting up to all sorts of hi jinks? They have about the same IQ.
who can be warm and likeable up close, who is neither malicious nor devious, who is bright and well-read and who believes passionately in the values that India was founded on.
Like what? The fact that isn't a nation? It is merely a union of states- like the EU?
Unfortunately, we rarely get to see this Rahul Gandhi.
Very true. Netflix should do a series on him and Prince Harry getting up to all sorts of hi jinks.
The importance of the Bharat Jodo Yatra is that it allows Rahul to be himself and to let the people see that side of him.
A guy who can walk and sometimes even talk. How truly wonderful!
At a time when India is divided by so much hatred,
Hatred of the RSS turned out to be foolish.
who cannot support a yatra that reaffirms that we are one, and that love must bind India together?
so that we can get back to the task of saying 'boo to the RSS!'
What happens next? I honestly don’t know. I had thought that there would be an experienced organisation man (like Ashok Gehlot or Kamal Nath) as Congress president and that the party would work at getting its act together.
Why bother if you don't have a PM face? All you can do is be a junior partner to a regional party while hoping the Janata Parivar comes up somebody credible. Meanwhile Kejriwal is cannibalizing your vote banks.
In that scenario Rahul could have done what he does best: travelled through India and inspired Congress workers on the ground, just as he is doing with this yatra.
How can you inspire people if you refuse to lead them? This is a farewell tour. The Gandhis are out of politics- though they may remain as back-seat drivers of the car-crash that is Congress.
I am not sure that under Mallikarjun Kharge this scenario will hold. But I do hope that Rahul Gandhi does not fall into the trap of trying to run the party himself. He is not good at it and he only makes things easier for the BJP.
He wouldn't run the country and he can't run Congress. So he isn't running, he is walking out of Indian political history.
Instead, he should build on the spirit of the Bharat Jodo Yatra and keep that goodwill alive. To adapt writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s famous dictum from The West Wing, he should let Rahul be Rahul.
While Modi remains Modi and wins in 2024. But Kejriwal too will remain Kejriwal and, by the end of the decade, may take a crack at the top job. Rahul could have remained Rahul while getting in a Prashant Kishore type Party manager. A charismatic technocrat who ticked the vote-bank boxes could have been Congress's Prime Ministerial candidate. The Opposition could have united on a 'States' rights' platform. Modi might have been cut down to size. Who knows? Some such thing might yet happen. Kharge may be 80, but he is smart. Provided there is no back-seat driving, the grand old party might yet pull together. Who knows? Maybe Kharge can get Varun Gandhi and his mother to rejoin Congress. Varun seems a serious sort- he has written a book on agricultural economics and has taken an independent line in Parliament. Perhaps he can restore the dynasty and Congress's political fortunes at one and the same time.
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