Forever Yatri

RAHUL CONTINUES HIS SEARCH FOR AN ALTERNATE PARADIGM WITHIN HIMSELF. AFTER A DISQUALIFICATION BURNISHED HIS STREET CRED, HE WILL NOW GO EAST TO WEST ON INDIA’S MAP

- Kaushik Deka

THE JOURNEY IS THE DESTINATION, THEY SAY, and the pilgrim's progress Rahul Gandhi marks often seems cut of that cloth. A second edition of the Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY) is coming upjust around the bend where we turn into 2024. This time, it's called the Bharat Nyay Yatra (BNY), the tweak in the name denoting a new thematic focus: "securing economic, social and political justice for the people of India. Starting on January 14, just a week before the other show heats up in Ayodhya, it will be a bus yatra for the most part, interspersed with short stretches where he will hit the ground walking, as in BJY. The caravan trail and the footfalls will follow the sun, kicking up dust along a trail from Manipur in the east, across 85 districts in 14 states, all the way to Mumbai on the western front, where all may not be quiet when he arrives on March 20. That will square the circle, the one he had left open-ended in January 2023, when the original epic wound to its ecstatic close in Srinagar. He had stood there in driven snow, looking a bit messianic, clad in a grey pheran, his white-flecked beard marking the length of his five-month padayatra.