The 150-day march of Gandhi is over

 The 150-day march of Gandhi is over. Will it, however, reinvigorate Congress?

 

SRIPERUMBUDUR: Rahul Gandhi, emulating Indian freedom icon Mahatma Gandhi, started his "long march" on Wednesday in an effort to stop the Congress party's ostensibly inevitable steady fall.

The Grand Old Party, which ruled for decades after India gained its independence from Britain in 1947, is now a discredited shell of its former self after being crushed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi (BJP).

 

Gandhi, who is not a descendant of the Mahatma but rather of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was mocked by Modi during the last two elections as an out-of-touch, pampered princeling and playboy. Gandhi worshipped at a monument in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, in the southern state, where his father Rajiv Gandhi was killed in 1991, just like his grandmother Indira had been seven years earlier.

 

"The politics of hatred and division cost me, my father. Gandhi, 52, declared on Twitter, "I will not lose my beloved country to it, either. He then travelled to the farthest southern point of India before circumnavigating the country in 150 days, walking 3,500 kilometres, concluding in Kashmir. However, it is unknown if he will walk the entire distance. He claimed that the purpose is to draw attention to Modi's, 71, government's chronic unemployment, skyrocketing inflation, and deepening polarisation between the majority of Hindus and religious minorities like Muslims.

 

Ahead of the massive march, Rahul addressed a gathering in New Delhi on Sunday. "I want to question you if price rises or hatred helps the country...Narendra Modi and the BJP are harming the country," he said.

"On the other side, the Congress party unites the nation. When enmity is eliminated, the nation advances more quickly. In a pivotal milestone for the independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi famously hiked 380 kilometres in 1930 to protest a salt charge imposed by British overlords.

 

Since India's independence in 1947, the Congress Party has been in power. However, since losing the 2014 national elections to the BJP and suffering a string of setbacks in state and municipal elections that followed, the Congress Party's power has steadily decreased. Analysts blame the party's dismal election performances on its inability to shed the influence of the Gandhi family and its lack of a defined ideological framework. It maintains a clear majority in just three of India's 31 states and union territories.

 

The National Election Watch and the Association for Democratic Reforms report that 399 elective candidates left Congress between 2014 and 2021 to join other parties. The party lost 39 out of 49 state elections at that time. And while many well-known Congress leaders have encountered public unhappiness over the years, it was under Rahul Gandhi's de facto leadership that the party's electoral gains reached historic lows in the 2014 and 2019 general elections, winning just 44 and 52 seats, out of 543, respectively. Rahul Gandhi is frequently depicted as an inept and reticent politician by a section of the Indian media.

 

Some analysts now claim that the march is the first, if very minor, move in the correct approach to rescue Congress and its scion from the political wilderness. It's not a simple process. Rasheed Kidwai, a seasoned journalist and political analyst who has covered the Congress Party for decades, claimed that it takes leaders years to become recognised as national leaders. "Despite that, it is unorthodox what he [Rahul Gandhi] has been able to do with this yatra." Kidwai was eager to point out that the march might not be sufficient.

 

He said that the BJP was able to grow its vote percentage from 31 per cent in 2014 to 38 per cent five years later. "At the end of the day, it's the vote that matters," he remarked.

 

"Winning elections is a political party's job. That serves as the yardstick by which a party is judged. We must wait and observe how this yatra will affect the party's electoral success," he continued.

 

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