‘All avenues of communication were shut’: Rahul Gandhi on why he embarked on ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’

Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said the party decided to undertake the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ as it saw no other means of communication with the masses. He said it appeared to be a gargantuan task but once the yatra started, it all became easy. Gandhi highlighted that they brought in the idea of and the word “love” into political discourse.

Speaking at the University of Texas on Sunday, Gandhi said, all avenues of communication with the people were shut before they embarked on the yatra. “All avenues of communication in India were shut. Every single one. No matter what we did, everything was blocked. We spoke in Parliament, but it wasn't televised. We went to the media, but they didn’t pick up what we said. We even presented documents to the legal system, but nothing happened. So, all the avenues were closed, and for a long time, we couldn’t understand how to communicate,” he said at the university.

Gandhi said that they suddenly hit the idea that if the media is not reaching to the masses then they should directly go to them. “The best way to do that was to literally walk across the country. And so, that’s what we did,” he said. 

The Congress leader said when the yatra began he was suffering from a knee problem and instantaneously wondered what he had gotten himself into. “It was a completely different paradigm. But it went surprisingly easy,” he said. 

Bharat Jodo Yatra was a mass movement initiated by the Congress party that took along party cadres, supporters and allies on a public march from Kanyakumari, India’s southernmost tip, to Jammu and Kashmir, all the way up north, covering 4,080 km over 150 days. The second leg of the march was called Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra that started in Manipur and ended in Mumbai over a period of 62 days. 

Gandhi said that the Bharat Jodo Yatra fundamentally changed the way he thinks about his work. “I would say it completely changed how I view politics, how I view our people, how I communicate with them, and how I listen to them,” said Gandhi, adding that it was not only him but everyone involved in the yatra who were changed in many ways.

“For all of us, the most powerful thing that happened organically, something we didn’t even plan, was the introduction of the idea of love in politics. This is strange because if you look at political discourse in most countries, you’ll never find the word love. It simply doesn’t exist in that context. You’ll find hatred, anger, unfairness, corruption—all these words—but rarely the word 'love.' The Bharat Jodo Yatra actually introduced that idea into the Indian political system, and I’ve been amazed at how well that idea has worked,” said Gandhi, in reference to his phrase ‘mohabbat ki dukan’ that caught during his campaigning for the Lok Sabha Elections 2024.