The Lack of Political Imagination in Rahul Gandhi’s Yatras – News18

In an election year, Congress scion Rahul Gandhi has embarked on a Nyay Yatra which has already traversed through the eastern states of India and will cover the central regions, and finally culminate in the western states. It is considered as an east-west equivalent of his 2023 Bharat Jodo Yatra which covered the southern and northern states. Nyay Yatra has not even found any optics or resonance with the Congress party faithfuls, let alone the masses, and with skirmishes in Assam and Bengal, and the departure of key INDI alliance ally Nitish Kumar in Bihar, the yatra already appears to be a failed and irrelevant project which thoroughly discredits Rahul Gandhi’s prime ministerial contentions and even raises question marks on the political imagination of the Congress party.

In the aftermath of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, a section of the political commentators created hullaballoo about a resultant electoral mobilisation but Rahul Gandhi managed to douse their enthusiasm with his ill-advised and ill-conceived remarks made on the state of democracy in India in a British university. Additionally, the episode of Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification as a Member of the Parliament (MP) that followed also became deeply symptomatic of the underlying uncaring and insubstantial politics that lies at the core of his political persona.

During the course of Bharat Jodo Yatra, his carefully constructed bearded avatar, indicative of the much-needed sincerity in his political life, coupled with his propensity to portray himself as a political martyr in the aftermath of his disqualification as a Lok Sabha MP, only exposed a sense of entitlement that an elitist ruling class had come to expect from the institutions of India. In the so-called Nyay Yatra, Rahul Gandhi has not only abandoned the mainstream political space right before the general elections but has also chosen political irrelevancy by choosing vague yatra objectives which are enough to provide him with some media coverage but can highly substantiate his claim for political power at the Centre.

Politics by no means

It was argued by the party commentariat that the enthusiasm of the ‘people’, generated by the first phase of the yatra alone, provided the Congress and its allies with a strong sense of electoral mobilisation and resolve that was needed to respond to the leadership crisis that emanated after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections when Rahul Gandhi ingloriously resigned from the post of the president of the Congress after serving a very short tenure of one and half years. After his disqualification as an MP in Lok Sabha, this perceived enthusiasm found its immediate realisation in the form of a joint protest by the Opposition parties who failed to see this as the law at work with some even articulating a case for legal immunity for the Gandhi family. Some commentators also saw it as a delivered political moment which would create ripples of sympathy wave among the electorate.

If with the Bharat Jodo Yatra and the subsequent disqualification, Gandhi had come to the centre stage of the Opposition politics, the Nyay Yatra has achieved exactly the opposite with the premature withering of INDI alliance partners and the Congress’ inability to find relevant issues that may find resonance with the voters. Rahul Gandhi’s obsession with the Adani row and the demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC), and lately the deliberate obfuscation of the Manipur violence and Caste Census, remind the general public of his erstwhile failure to convince and project the Rafael deal into a corruption issue before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. His political immaturity was reflected in his resolve to continue with the Nyay Yatra, albeit with a bus this time, while ignoring the parliament budget session, its noise and optics, and in his inability to prioritise working out a coalition with the INDI alliance parties which involved bargains and machinations.

Contrastingly, Prime Minister Modi, from his political charisma and rhetorical astuteness, has reassured his voters with neatly designed welfare and development programmes, his advocacy of India’s interests at home and abroad, and a vision of ‘Viksit Bharat’ in 2047. Under India’s presidency, the multilateral forum of G20 was successfully reshaped and reinvented. In 2024, he has not allowed an inch of political territory by capitalising on the consecration of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya, reaching out to the electorate in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and with note-setting speeches and the release of the white paper on economic mismanagement of UPA in the recently concluded session of the parliament.

On the other hand, Rahul Gandhi’s ‘politics of love’ has not translated into the pursuit of real issues which fuel political life and can deliver electoral victory in the general elections in contemporary India. The political mileage of this ‘politics of love’ probably merits, at best, a press conference and some flattering prose written by party intellectuals, but not the real and tangible votes of Indians. In short, apart from the pull of dynastic and appeasement politics, and the big-tent approach of the Congress, Rahul Gandhi today has nothing to offer to the Indian electorate. He fails at politics itself.

Looking back at Yatras

It can be comfortably argued that even in recent years of successful electioneering by the BJP, the Indian electorate has genuinely rewarded several political actors, regional as well as national, who sought to mobilise it in clear alignment with its wants and aspirations. A case for a vigorous, demanding and mature electorate can be made on the basis of the study of the phenomenon of yatras. It should be noted that yatras have been a part of our religio-cultural ecosystem having spiritual as well as historical connotations. Gandhian reworking of this religious jargon as a means of anti-colonial struggle has been very well documented. In recent history also, yatras have proven to be a very primal way to engage with the lively democratic processes of modern Indian polity. The Rath Yatra of Lal Krishna Advani reinvented the politics of India and legitimised the rise of the BJP through the Ram temple politics.

In recent times, Praja Sankalpa Yatra was also undertaken by Jagan Mohan Reddy in 2017 which, many argued, propelled him to power in Andhra Pradesh. Election strategist and political entrepreneur Prashant Kishore is on a Jan Suraj Yatra of his own, seeking a mobilisation of the people against Nitish Kumar in Bihar. Sachin Pilot’s innumerable visits to different parts of Rajasthan in the pre-Assembly elections duly rewarded the Congress party in 2018. Even Imran Khan in the neighbouring country sought legitimacy by addressing several Jalsas and thereby connecting with the people, a possible equivalent of the yatra if we don’t go into the hermeneutics of translation.

If this political method of establishing a grassroots connection with the people is so simple and effective in the Indian subcontinent, it also goes on to underline a significant principle of our lively democratic processes that was also highlighted by Prime Minister Modi in one of his recent speeches. Direct means of connecting with the people and galvanising them towards the outreach programmes work for both the party cadre as well as the electorate. The BJP, and to some extent, AAP, YSRCP, and other regional parties have fine-tuned this level of engagement with the people and have also spent a lot of time finding the right vocabulary that resonates with the masses. Social media has also allowed such political organisations to bypass the jargon of opinion-makers and the intellectual fatigue they cause. Political fortunes in our democracy still significantly rest on the ability to communicate and connect with the masses in the sabhas, rallies, road shows and yatras, a case that Prime Minister Modi proves daily.

Rhetorical Failures

Rahul Gandhi and the machinery that he represents lack political clarity in both imagination as well as the projection of political ideas. The irony between the expectations of mass mobilisation immediately after a yatra in a democratic polity like ours, and the pictures of a surveillance state and constraints on the basic structure of Indian democracy, painted by Mr Gandhi routinely, is not lost on the general public. He expects the masses to heed the messages of the Opposition by the barest of acts of mobilisation and political engagement, and on the other side betrays the whole process of a democratic polity by questioning the processes of elections and governance through his verbal misadventures, and often suggests the compromise of the institutions of judiciary and media in internationalist settings that entertain his sophomoric enthusiasm.

The constant conflation between the government of the day and the nation reflects badly on the part of the Congress’s political machinery and the scion of the Gandhi dynasty. His invocation of the prime minister’s caste in the Nyay Yatra betrayed his lack of political understanding as his party’s treatment of social justice as a principle of politics is very chequered. A sense of political clarity would have allowed him to navigate his caste prejudices and divisive politics without vocalising them in disparaging terms for a person whose rise to the prime minister’s position validates the success of Indian democracy.

Conclusion

Yatra as a medium to gauge the electorate will continue to be relevant in India’s diverse democracy. What they require is a generative political imagination with which resonances can be built and the message of the voters can be conveyed and represented. India’s electorate still finds the liberal internationalist approach to creating global discussions around local issues clearly unpalatable and remains very cognizant of the vested interest groups. Rahul Gandhi will do well to learn from the failures of the Left which constantly seeks international validations and even pursues global opinions and irrelevant terminologies to respond to local issues.

Sorosesque agenda-driven opinions will have a limited impact on contemporary India’s democratic processes. The reality of polities like India is increasingly marked by the belief in the ability of the nation to deliver for its own people. With or without yatra, for any politics that offers itself as an alternate national politics, unwavering belief and commitment to the democratic processes of India is the least that it should offer.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.