The yatris will cover 3,570 kms on foot during the 5-month long yatra, sleeping in containers and cooking at campsites.
Bharat Jodo Yatra hoardings on the road connecting Kanyakumari to Thiruvananthapuram. (KB Jayachandran/South First)
The coastal town of Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, located on the southernmost tip of the peninsula, is all spruced up for the launch on Wednesday, 7 September, of Rahul Gandhi’s 3,570-km mass-contact programme that is scheduled to end in Srinagar sometime in January.
Called the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ or the ‘Unite India March’, Gandhi’s Congress party is projecting the event as unprecedented in the history of free India, with him walking six to seven hours every day over the next five months to cover the total distance.
The Gandhi scion will be accompanied by about 120 party workers, including 38 women, during the march covering 12 states and two Union territories.
The event is aimed at mobilising large-scale public opinion across the country against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP-run government at the Centre.
The Congress wants to project it is not a spent force anymore at the inaugural itself, and thousands of party workers from Tamil Nadu and Kerala are slated to throng the Kanyakumari beach to witness the launch of the months-long march.
The participants in the march, or “yatris”, will sleep in containers mounted on trucks at nights, instead of hotels, cook food at campsites, and have access to laundry every three days, Congress Rajya Sabha member Digvijay Singh told South First over the phone.
One of the trucks with sleeping facilities readied for the yatra. (Supplied)
While Gandhi will get a single container due to security reasons, the other yatris will have to share containers.
Another Rajya Sabha member, Jairam Ramesh, who is coordinating the march along with Digvijay Singh, told mediapersons that Gandhi “will speak less and listen more” during the journey.
He also said anyone — be it writers, scholars, scientists, film personalities or farmers and fish workers — could join the yatra or meet the participants at already announced venues to extend solidarity.
Gandhi is scheduled to begin his journey by offering floral tributes to Mahatma Gandhi at the Gandhi Memorial in Kanyakumari, where he will be accompanied by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and DMK supremo MK Stalin.
The Congress party’s Kanyakumari district leader VM Binulal Singh said 59 trucks with mounted containers have already arrived at Kanyakumari.
Almost all full-time participants have also arrived in Kanyakumari and the neighbouring city of Nagercoil.
Digvijay Singh said the principal aim of the march was to unite the country against the Modi regime, which caused “severe economic and livelihood destruction, heightened unemployment and inequalities, and fuelled hatred and divisions among communities”.
Party Lok Sabha member Manickam Tagore elaborated. “There are three issues that Congress is facing currently today,” he told South First.
The Mahatma Gandhi memorial at Kanyakumari beach from where Rahul Gandhi will kickstart the Bharat Jodo Yatra. (KB Jayachandran/South First)
First, he said, the party needed to prepare the electoral machine, which will be done with the help of political consultant Sunil Kanugolu. The second concerns the leadership issue, with internal party elections round corner. The third is about setting the “narrative”.
“This is what the whole yatra is all about,” Tagore said. “Rahul Gandhi wants to set the narrative and tell the people about how the Modi government is creating an environment of fear and hatred in the society. He will also talk extensively about the bad governance of the Centre.”
Tagore also felt Rahul Gandhi’s visit to Sriperumbudur, where his father was assassinated, will have an emotional impact in Tamil Nadu.
Though the yatra will be officially inaugurated on Wednesday, it will start its northward journey only the next morning.
It will move around in the Kanyakumari district for four days and enter Kerala on 11 September, after the Onam holidays, tour Kerala over 18 days, and will enter Karnataka on 30 September via Gudalur in the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu.
A massive reception has been planned at Nilambur town in Gandhi’s Lok Sabha constituency Wayanad on 25 September.
The prominent cities scheduled to be covered by the yatra include Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Nilambur, Mysuru, Bengaluru, Bellary, Raichur, Vikarabad, Nanded, Jalgaon, Indore, Kota, Dausa, Alwar, Bulandshahr, Delhi, Ambala, Pathankot, Jammu, and Srinagar.
The yatra is scheduled to reach Bengaluru on 17 October, coinciding with the day a new Congress party president will be elected; yatra participants can vote at the Karnataka PCC office.
Keeping in mind the heat, the yatra will begin at 7 am each day, take a few hours’ break around 10.30 am, resume at 3.30 pm, and wind up for the day at 6.30 pm. The participants will walk for at least 22 km daily.
Small solidarity yatras have also been planned during the same period in eastern and north-eastern states such as Assam, Tripura, Bihar, Odisha, and West Bengal.
“Mile Kadam, Jude Watan” (Come Together, United the Country) is the tagline of the yatra.
As if to corroborate this, party leaders claim over 40,000 people unaffiliated with any political party have registered themselves on the yatra website, expressing their wish to join at various locations.
Gandhi is expected to take breaks during the walk to campaign for the upcoming Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat Assembly elections.
(With inputs from Shilpa Nair in Chennai)
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