Can Rahul Gandhi’s Padayatra Revive Congress’ Fortune?
May 16, 2015
To curious onlookers, Rahul Gandhi seems a quintessential traveller. Not many contemporary Indian politicians have traversed the globe as much as the Gandhi scion. He has shown the gumption of treading hitherto unknown terrains of the country, and his ways have been ingenious. A few years back, he stopped over a dalit’s house to grab a meal in a nondescript Jawahar Singh ka Purwa village in Amethi district in Uttar Pradesh in 2008, and hogged the headlines.
There is no ambiguity over the purpose of crisscrossing the countryside – they are all politically driven! Even his supposedly private foreign junkets, too! His recent two-months-long disappearance to some unknown foreign destinations is an example. It grabbed public attention but he avoided media scrutiny. That was indeed one of the most discussed private tours of a fallen public figure that allowed him to remain in news for two months in absentia! This was indeed an achievement at a time when he was completely written off after he led the Congress to a complete rout at 2014 general elections and the subsequent elections in states that were considered his party’s bastions.
This time again, soon after returning from his sabbatical in a foreign land, he boarded the second class compartment of a train to Punjab to visit some mandis (markets). Thereafter, he embarked on an eye grabbing ‘kisan padayatra’ in the drought-hit areas of Vidarbha and Telangana to espouse the cause of the farmers and highlight the inadequacies in the central government’s controversial land acquisition bill.
Theatrics were involved, too. The routes he chose in Amravati (Maharashtra) were decorated with Rangolis when he foot marched there on the May Day. A fortnight later, he redid a Jawahar Singh ka Purwa in Wadyal village of Telangana where he stopped for a bath and tea at a beedi worker’s house after an arduous 15-km walk in the blistering summer heat in the drought-affected five villages of Adilabad district of Telangana. At least 120 farmers had committed suicide since the new state was carved out of Andhra Pradesh on 2 June 2014. On Friday, 15 May, Rahul embarked on a mission to lend his voice to their plight. In the process, he is also doling out cash to the farmers, which is more of a political gesture than anything else. Not long ago, the Congress was at the helm in the undivided Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra and therefore, equally responsible for farmers’ woes in the region.
Why Padayatras?
We still remember Mahatma Gandhi’s historic 240-km march to Dandi from Ahmedabad in March 1930. That is acknowledged as a turning point in India’s freedom struggle against the British. We also remember the padayatra undertaken by Acharya Vinoba Bhave during the Bhoodan Movement of 1951 that resulted in comprehensive land reforms in the country.
Picking up the cue from there, politicians have often embarked on padayatras and even Rathyatras (BJP’s Lal Krishna Advani being the foremost charioteer) for political gains and the list has kept on expanding – from former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar in 1983 (to “know the country better”), to actor- turned-Congress leader Sunil Dutt in 1987 (when he walked all the way from Bombay to Amritsar, to “arouse the nation’s conscience”), and former Andhra Chief Minister Y.S.Rajasekhara Reddy (who undertook the padayatra to galvanise his voters before the 2004 general elections and state assembly polls), to Mamata Banerjee, who reaped rich dividends ahead of the 2011 West Bengal polls. The latest in the list was Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party Supremo Arvind Kejriwal, who undertook padayatras as a mass contact drive in Delhi before the 2015 state elections.
To keep the record straight, even Rahul is not new to padayatras. Before the 2012 state assembly elections, too, he had undertaken an arduous 105-km march from Bhatta-Parsaul in Greater Noida to Aligarh to highlight the ‘atrocities’ of the then UP Chief Minister Mayawati against farmers.
Yet, the difference between other padayatris and Rahul was that unlike the others, he failed to translate his efforts into political gains. In 2012, despite his padayatra, the Congress fared badly in Uttar Pradesh.
Can Rahul’s Padayatras Help Congress Regain Its Lost Ground?
So, can his padayatras now bring the desired results considering that none of these states faces immediate elections except Punjab where state elections are due in less than two years’ time? The states that face elections in near future are Bihar, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. The condition of farmers is no better in these states either. Consider how a farmer attempted suicide in front of a Bihar minister in Patna at a time when Rahul was foot marching in Adilabad on 15 May.
Politically speaking, there does seem some serious flaw in Rahul’s choice of venues for his padayatras. Once bitten after his much publicised padayatra failed to revive the Congress’s fortunes in his home state of Uttar Pradesh, isn’t he acting twice shy by avoiding the states that face elections in near future?
The BJP has pulled Rahul up and described his padayatras as an attempt to ‘revive’ his own sagging political career and that farmers are just his stepping stones. According to the party, “He is trying to revive himself within the folds of the Congress, where there have been views that he is not fit to become the president of Congress.”
Yet one thing is clear. Rahul has indeed emerged as a wanderer who enjoys leading a nomadic life in full public glare and prefers to escape media scrutiny. He wasn’t media savvy when the Congress was in power. Even after losing power, he remains selectively reticent. As of today, he has preferred to remain mum on his latest foreign tour. This does not bode well for a leader who wishes to spend time for public causes and have a feel of their ordeals by embarking on padayatras in scorching summer heat. Unless he becomes more transparent in his dealings, even his well-intentioned efforts would be misread as self-serving, if not sinister designs. Particularly, at a time when his brother-in-law faces probe over misappropriating farmers’ land through fraudulent land deals in Haryana
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