Indian scion marches for the common man
Rahul Gandhi’s trek could return his party to relevance
BURHANPUR, India — On the 76th day of his march north through the entire length of India, Rahul Gandhi — scion of a oncemighty political dynasty — walked into a textile-making town, his face and hair covered in dust.
Gone were the luxury trappings his adversaries in India’s Hindu nationalist governing party had used to caricature him as entitled and aloof. Now Gandhi was speaking of blistered feet and the struggle of the common man. He was shaking hands with children, hugging older men and women who caressed his hair and kissed his forehead, on what he hoped was a 2,000-mile journey out of the political wilderness for his once-dominant Congress party.
“Every democratic institution was shut for us by the government: Parliament, media, elections,” Gandhi, 52, told supporters in late November in Burhanpur, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. “There was no other way but to hit the streets to listen and connect with people.”
With a national election less than 16 months away, Gandhi’s march could determine whether India’s fractured political opposition can do anything to halt the era-defining ambitions of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The future of India as a multiparty democracy hangs in the balance. Modi, one of the most powerful leaders in India’s history, has remade its secular political foundation to privilege the Hindu majority and sideline Muslims and other minorities. Modi’s lieutenants say the BJP will remain in control of the country for decades to come.
As the party has tightened its grip across the country and its institutions, the opposition complains about being pushed out of platforms where they can reach the masses in the cycle of democratic politics.
Parliament, once a thriving debate chamber, is now largely confined to ministerial speeches, with the governing party avoiding debates on key policy issues. The BJP, through a mix of pressure and the threat of withholding government advertising money, has cowed the traditional media.
After Gandhi reached Burhanpur, with some watching him from rooftops and others from the branches of trees, there was barely a mention of it on nightly television programs.
That Gandhi has found it necessary to walk the length of India, fighting to steal a ray of the spotlight and project a new profile, is the culmination of a once-unimaginable reversal of fortune for his family
and party.
The Indian National Congress party has led the country for two-thirds of its 75 years of independence, and the Gandhi-Nehru family has produced three prime ministers who governed for a total of nearly four decades.
But in Gandhi’s decade as the party’s official president or de facto leader, it has faced repeated defeats in national and state elections and currently has just 53 of the 543 seats in Parliament. The BJP has 303 seats.
With the party increasingly defined by loyalty to the family that has been central to its history, the dilemma around its decline is often simplified as: can’t do with or without the Gandhis.
As the Congress party has withered, its scandals and infighting have played out in public. The muddle created by the family’s inability to reconcile warring factions has resulted in stagnation at the local level, party officials
say, and high-ranking defections.
“This march, of course, is a last-ditch attempt on his part to revive the fortunes of his party and to bolster his national image,” said Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University. “But beyond the fanfare, he has failed to spell out a clear, alternative vision for the country.”
Gandhi said he started his journey — which will take roughly 150 days as he and his entourage of 120 cover about 13 miles a day, sleeping in containers hauled on heavy trucks — to help unite a country he said is deeply polarized by Modi’s politics.
Since September, as he has passed through villages and small towns across seven states, Gandhi’s march has attracted a wide range of followers: farmers facing an inescapable cycle of debt, Indigenous people struggling to protect rainforests from developers, and students anxious about upward mobility in an economy failing to provide enough jobs.
In attacking the governing party, Gandhi has voiced the worries of a vast section of the population suffering from the deeply unequal reality of an economy hindered by high levels of youth unemployment and rising inflation.
“When he listened patiently to us and spoke of the pain of the common man, my opinion about him changed,” said Amar Thakur, who supported the BJP in the last elections and met Gandhi in Burhanpur. “Enough of hate now. I will vote for his party.”
Gandhi’s simple message of unity, Congress leaders said, amounts to the party’s first major ideological assault against the Hindufirst idea of India being cemented by the BJP.
“It is our last roll of the dice,” said Jairam Ramesh, a former federal minister who has been walking with Gandhi. “We are putting everything we have in it.
If we don’t make a difference through it, then there is a problem for us both as a party and as an ideology.”
Modi’s mark on Indian politics is so indelible that Gandhi, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has appeared to emulate him during his countrywide journey even as he has presented himself as an alternative.
Gandhi’s forehead has often been adorned with a red dot, a mark of Hindu piety. He now sports a beard. He often participates in temple visits and religious ceremonies as he stops in villages and towns.
Such long marches are part of a well-established political tradition in India dating back to the country’s independence struggle. In the 1990s, when the roles were reversed, the BJP undertook a similar march, rallying around the construction of a Hindu temple where a Mughalera mosque had stood. That march helped fire up the BJP’s ideological base and set the stage for its subsequent rise.
It is far from clear whether Gandhi can bring his party back from a path to irrelevance in national politics. But he seems to be banking on a two-pronged strategy — at once putting himself at the center of the effort to build a narrative and direction while creating some distance by turning over the party presidency to someone outside the family.
After long periods of resentment within the Congress ranks about the Gandhi family’s refusal to share the leadership, the party in October elected an 80-year-old loyalist as its first non-Gandhi president in 24 years.
To some critics, the choice of the new leader, as well as the march’s singular focus on Gandhi, made clear that the family was not letting go in meaningful ways that could fix the party’s dysfunction and erosion of support.