Aaditya Thackeray joins Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Yatra

NANDED: In an event that is very significant politically, Thackeray scion Aaditya joined Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra on Friday. The development indicates that the Thackeray faction of the Shiv Sena is keen on continuing its friendship with the Congress which began about three years ago when the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government was formed in Maharashtra.

A day after the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) extended its support to the yatra, Aaditya Thackeray walked with Rahul Gandhi for around seven kilometres from the Nanded-Hingoli border to Bhategaon in Hingoli district. Thackeray joined the yatra along with party colleague Ambadas Danve, who is the leader of the Opposition in the legislative council.

Aaditya’s meeting Gandhi in a public event was an unusual happening, the first of its kind in the largely inimical relationship between the Congress and the Shiv Sena over the decades. Both leaders also hugged each other after concluding their walk. The Maharashtra Congress had actually invited Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray for the yatra and were assured that Uddhav would join. However, later Aditya was deputed to join Gandhi.

Aaditya said the Shiv Sena (UBT) was supporting the yatra to save democracy and the Constitution. “Indira Gandhi had a good equation with Balasaheb Thackeray (the late Shiv Sena founder),” he said. “Congress and Shiv Sena leaders have been friends. Balasaheb Thackeray had supported Pratibha Patil and Pranab Mukherjee in the Presidential polls. Now we’ve come together to save democracy and the Constitution.”

On the sixth day of the yatra in Maharashtra, yatris entered Hingoli district where they got a grand welcome. Gandhi met representatives of the Maulana Azad Vichar Manch, who spoke to him about mob-lynching incidents that were on the rise in the country. Gandhi’s reaction was blunt. “It’s not mob-lynching but organised murder,” he averred. The Congress leader also met a group of retired judges and lawyers who said that judicial institutions were being threatened like never before.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge gifted a laptop to Sarvesh Hatne, a student, in Gandhi’s presence. Hatne had met Gandhi while participating in the yatra on Thursday, and while interacting with him had revealed that he wanted to be a software engineer but had never seen a computer because even his school didn’t have one. The laptop was the Congress’s surprise gift to him.

In Maharashtra, both erstwhile allies of the Congress in the MVA—the NCP and Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT)— have lent their support to Gandhi’s yatra.

HT PHOTO Aaditya Thackeray walked with Rahul Gandhi for around seven kilometres.