Congress’ Bharat Jodo Yatra: Can India's grand old party regain its former glory?

The former leader of the Indian National Congress party, and the descendant of three prime ministers, Rahul Gandhi is on a march to rejuvenate India's "grand old party."

He has so far crossed three states — Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka — as part of a 3,570-kilometer-long (2,218 miles) tour on foot of Indian cities, towns and villages, which is set to last five months.

The party not only hopes that the "Bharat Jodo Yatra" (Unite India March) will be a route to its political revival — by bringing issues such as inflation, unemployment and communal polarization in the country to the forefront of political debates — but it also wants to repackage Gandhi as a people's politician.

Can the Congress turn things around?

"No one can stop us from uniting India. No one can stop us from raising the voice of India. No one can stop the Bharat Jodo Yatra from going from Kanyakumari to Kashmir," Gandhi told a crowd of supporters after entering Karnataka state.

It is the Congress party's largest public campaign in years and comes ahead of an election for the party's new president.

The main candidates for the October 17 election are two Congress parliamentarians: the veteran Mallikarjun Kharge and the younger diplomat-turned-politician Shashi Tharoor.

For the first time in 25 years, the Congress — which ruled India for over 60 years after independence from the British Empire in 1947 — is poised to have a non-Gandhi family Congressman at the helm.

"Only a strong Congress can work like a pillar of strength for opposition unity. If one of the outcomes of the march is opposition unity, that's welcome. But the purpose is certainly not opposition unity. Our focus is on strengthening the party," Jairam Ramesh, Congress general secretary in charge of communication, told DW.

Ramesh pointed out that the march was intended to stir up party workers throughout the country and make them part of this revival process.

"It opens opportunities and changes perceptions. We are setting the narrative," he added.

"What the party needs now is fresh energy and a sense of purpose after a prolonged leadership crisis. We have also had several high-profile people leave the party to join the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party]," a senior party functionary told DW.

A counter to Hindu nationalism

A political party that dominated the Indian political landscape for much of its century-long history, the Congress is desperately trying to reinvent itself ahead of the next general election in 2024.

A far cry from its prior hegemony, Congress is now in power in only two of India's 31 states and federal territories — the states of Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, where the party has majority support. In Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Jharkhand, it shares power with regional partners.

In the past, even when it was out of power, it at least remained the fulcrum of the opposition. However, for the first time, the party has been stripped of even this role and is losing its pole position.

Political experts say that the Congress's decline has to be seen in the context of the rise of majoritarianism as well as internal factors related to the party.

Political scientist Zoya Hasan believes the crisis in the Congress may owe more to the party's failure to effectively counter Hindu nationalism and the shrinking of the centrist space because of religious and caste polarization, than to individual or organizational failures.

In her recently published book, "Ideology and Organisation in Indian Politics," she focuses primarily on the Congress's decline in the past decade, linking it to the larger political transformation underway in India.

"Hindu nationalism posed the most formidable challenge to the Congress party and the pluralist idea of India it espoused and promoted," Hasan told DW.

"Both as a strategy and as an actuality, the mixing of religiosity and politics doesn't guarantee electoral dividends for the Congress. The Congress needs to offer an alternative unifying vision to divisive politics," she added.

In her reckoning, the Congress party needs to build ideological opposition to the BJP through mass contact campaigns and battles to protect the constitutional rights of citizens.

BJP plays down Gandhi's long march

The party's strategists understand that the ruling BJP juggernaut cannot be stopped without restoring Congress' own capacity to win a substantive number of seats.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi won an absolute majority both in the 2014 and 2019 general elections. The Congress party, on the other hand, reached a historic low of 44 seats in India's parliament, the Lok Sabha, in 2014 and that only increased to 52 in 2019. It has also lost 39 out of 49 state elections since 2014.

"The situation is ripe for this march to happen. It is passing through precisely those areas to consolidate the Congress vote and, by implication, the solid block of two-thirds of voters who did not support the BJP in 2014 and 2019," Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar told DW.

But the BJP has downplayed the march and termed it "directionless" saying its only purpose was to attack the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) movement, to which the BJP traces its roots.

"To describe Rahul Gandhi's #BharatJodoYatra in one word, it would be directionless. Seems like the futile rally is solely aimed at attacking RSS and its ideologies," said Keshava Sudhakar, Karnataka's BJP minister for health and family welfare.

Given that Modi heads the most powerful government in decades, mounting a credible challenge in 2024 will not be easy.

After marching through three states so far and with nine more ahead, Rahul Gandhi's long march will culminate in Kashmir next year. It remains to be seen whether the campaign will translate into a significant change in the party's electoral fortunes.