Congress’ yatra focuses on 129 South seats, downplays Hindi belt seats

NEW DELHI: The Congress’ 150-day, 3,570-km long Bharat Jodo Yatra, which covers 12 states with 237 Lok Sabha seats, has given a complete miss to or is barely touching 18 states that have over 300 Lok Sabha seats. The yatra aims to galvanise popular support ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Among the 18 states the Bharat Jodo Yatra is missing or barely touching are the seven Hindi speaking states that comprise at least 182 Lok Sabha seats and have remained the bastion of the BJP since 2014. The Yatra is also giving a complete miss to the 12 eastern and northeastern states that elect 139 MPs to the Lok Sabha. However, the Bharat Jodo Yatra is extensively covering the five southern states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, where the Congress is going to spend a considerable amount of almost three-and-a-half months of the total five-month long yatra.
These five southern states together elect 129 MPs to the Lok Sabha. However, currently, the Congress is not in power in any of these five states. Political observers and journalists who track the Congress say that the Yatra route was carefully chosen by Congress leaders keeping on mind the practical reality of the party.
“The Congress is weak organisationally in most Hindi belt states and also in almost all of the eastern and northeastern states. The BJP, over the years, has built a strong citadel in these states, which the Congress thinks would be hard to breach at this moment. The Congress is hoping that by spending maximum time and resources in the southern states where the BJP is organisationally weak, they would be able to get around 60 of the 129 Lok Sabha seats. This seems to be their carefully thought-out strategy,” a senior journalist tracking the Congress, told this correspondent.
Another political expert from Delhi said that the Congress knew that despite trying hard to break into the BJP bastions, it was not being able to do so and, therefore, chose places where the BJP was weak. “This strategy might seem bad for many within the Congress and I know that many are not happy with this. But then look at Uttar Pradesh; despite Priyanka Gandhi Vadra camping in the state before the Assembly elections, the Congress drew a blank. The people of these states associate with the BJP very much in the present times and the Congress seems to have understood this and therefore chose to focus on states where it has some chance,” the political expert said.
The Bharat Jodo Yatra has traversed the CPM-ruled state of Kerala for almost 18 days, before it entered Karnataka earlier last week, where the party is expected to travel for almost 25 days. After Karnataka, it would enter Andhra Pradesh and Telangana before it moves into Maharashtra.
However, missing out 300-plus seats by the Congress in the majority of the Hindi belt states that were once a bastion of the Congress, has made many Congress leaders in these states unhappy. The Rahul Gandhi-led yatra has decided to give a complete miss to states like Bihar, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh, and barely touches Hindi belt states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana.
In Uttar Pradesh, the Congress’ Bharat Jodo Yatra will pass through the city of Bulandshahr before it enters Delhi, while in Madhya Pradesh, although the Yatra will pass through much of the Malwa region, it will, however, make a major pitstop only at Indore, before it enters Rajasthan. For Haryana, the yatra will make a major pitstop at Ambala at the Punjab-Haryana border, before entering Punjab.
Both Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh had been a long-standing fortress of the Congress and its allies, which was breached by the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. Since 2014, the BJP has been able to win a majority of the seats from these two states. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won 28 of the 29 Lok Sabha seats from Madhya Pradesh, while in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP won 62 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats.
The Congress won a total of 2 Lok Sabha seats in the 2019 general elections from these two states. The party’s tally in the 2014 Lok Sabha seats was no better.
In Haryana, the Congress lost its bastion to the BJP in 2014 and both during the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha, the Congress drew a blank from the state. The Congress’ Bharat Jodo Yatra has also decided to skip the election-going states of Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, states where the Yatra would not even enter. Both Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh will be holding Assembly elections in a month’s time from now.
Many within the Congress say that Rahul Gandhi “deliberately” missing out these crucial states will do more harm than good to the Congress in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Congress leaders from Gujarat that this correspondent spoke to also said that Rahul Gandhi should have kept in mind the Assembly elections in Gujarat and started the Yatra from that state, rather than going to Kanyakumari where the party has very little presence. However, Congress’ Gujarat state president, Jagdish Thakor told The Sunday Guardian that he didn’t believe that anyone could disagree with the Bharat Jodo Yatra plans.
Thakor said, “The entire route of the Yatra was planned taking in confidence all the states; so I fail to understand who these people are who are saying that Gujarat is being deliberately missed. Rahul Gandhi will hold separate rallies in our state keeping in mind the Gujarat elections and, moreover, by the time the Yatra would have reached Gujarat, the state elections would have been over. Therefore, it was decided that there would be separate rallies and programmes of all our senior leaders in the state during the elections.”
Another senior Congress leader from Delhi told The Sunday Guardian said that Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra initially decided to give a complete miss to Uttar Pradesh since the party organisation in that state was not up to the mark, but after pressure from the state unit, at the last moment, Bulandshahr was added to the route, before entering Delhi.
As fort the Bharat Jodo Yatra completely missing out the 12 eastern and northeastern states that together send 139 MPs to the Lok Sabha, some Congress leaders are unhappy with this decision. Leaders from Assam, Nagaland, Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Mizoram expressed their displeasure that the party had chosen to ignore these states as they were not a part of “mainland India”.
“Just because there are not many seats that the northeastern states have for the Lok Sabha, the Congress chose to ignore our state. I hear some parallel yatras will take place, which is good, but why can the leaders not have a parallel yatra from East to West when they can have one from South to North?” a Congress leader from Assam told this paper.
However, Congress working president from Assam, Jakir Hossain Sikdar, told The Sunday Guardian that the Congress did not deliberately ignore the seven sister state of the Northeast, and that the party would hold a simultaneous and parallel five-month long “Assam Jodo” Yatra which will start from the Dhubri district of Assam on 1 November.
“India is a vast country and the entire nation cannot be covered at one go. You see the enthusiasm with which the Bharat Jodo yatra is going on and the response it is receiving across the country. In Assam, we have decided to launch the Assam Jodo Yatra where we will have our senior leaders come and participate in the yatra. This will also connect some of the northeastern states,” Jakir Hossain Sikdar told The Sunday Guardian.
Bosiram Sriram, Congress’ working president from Arunachal Pradesh, told The Sunday Guardian, “The terrain of the northeastern states is such that this is not the right time to have the Yatra here. There are landslides and incessant rains that affect our state and, therefore, it was decided that a separate yatra could take place for these states.”
Congress’ Bihar Pradesh Congress president, Madan Mohan Jha, told The Sunday Guardian said that the Yatra had just begun and at one go, the entire country couldn’t be covered. “This time the Yatra is going from North to the South and our leader Jairam Rameshji has already said that it is just the first leg, in the second round, I am sure the East and Northeast would be covered,” Madan Mohan Jha said.
The Congress’ Bharat Jodo Yatra, which began on 11 September from Tamil Nadu’s Kanyakumari has so far traversed around 490 km in 20 days. The Yatra will pass through 12 states before it reaches Jammu and Kashmir, four-and-a-half months from now.