Head-on | Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra foretells Opposition disunity in 2024

Regional leaders who did not join former Congress president Rahul Gandhi in his 3,570-km Bharat Jodo Yatra reveal the likely contours of the national Opposition against the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee stayed conspicuously away from the yatra. So did Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Akhilesh Yadav kept a safe distance from the yatra as it passed through Uttar Pradesh. BSP leader Mayawati, like several other Opposition leaders, had received a signed letter from Rahul Gandhi inviting her to join the yatra in Uttar Pradesh. She politely declined. Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik didn’t bother to respond. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar made supportive gestures but again stayed away.

What does all this foretell about the shape Opposition unity will take in 2024? Opposition leaders face a dilemma. They know the only way to pose a serious challenge to the Narendra Modi-led BJP electoral juggernaut is by forming a united front. The result in the 2022 Gujarat Assembly election showed how triangular fights help the BJP. In contrast, the outcome in Himachal Pradesh showed that, in a largely binary contest, the BJP can be defeated.

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Competing interests among regional leaders make Opposition unity in the 2024 General Election difficult to pull off. Mamata Banerjee, for example, doesn’t want to play second fiddle to the Congress. Her relationship with Rahul Gandhi is frosty.

Kejriwal meanwhile is playing the long game. To him 2024 is a fait accompli for Modi. He is targeting 2029. To be seen as part of a Congress-led front in 2024 could prove counter-productive for his own future national ambitions.

Akhilesh Yadav has a more local vision. His focus is the Uttar Pradesh assembly election in 2027. He wants to make it a binary fight between the SP and BJP. Akhilesh knows that Yogi Adityanath, after two terms as chief minister, could move to the Centre, leaving a leadership vacuum in Uttar Pradesh in 2027. Anti-incumbency will be rife. Mayawati’s presence would have shrunk further. The key for Akhilesh therefore is to eliminate the Congress as even a fringe contender in Uttar Pradesh in 2027. The job was half done in the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly poll when Congress was reduced to just 2.33 per cent vote share.

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If Mayawati’s BSP and Congress are made irrelevant in Uttar Pradesh in 2027, the binary BJP-SP battle Akhilesh seeks could become a reality. If Yogi meanwhile moves to the Centre, SP could hope to build on the 111 seats it won in the 403-seat Uttar Pradesh Assembly. Trudging along with Rahul in the Bharat Jodo Yatra across Uttar Pradesh does not sit well with the SP’s plan to decimate the Congress in the state.

Much the same logic applies to Mamata Banerjee. She has succeeded in sidelining the Congress-Left alliance in West Bengal, cutting short the BJP’s expected surge. The state, like UP, is now a binary contest between the TMC and BJP. Thus in both West Bengal and UP the BJP faces tough regional rivals with committed vote banks.

Lok Sabha elections have a different dynamic from state Assembly polls. The 2024 Lok Sabha election promises to be a presidential-type contest, pitting Narendra Modi against the rest.

Rahul has used the Bharat Jodo Yatra to place the Congress in pole position to challenge Modi in 2024. Braving the northern winter in a white T-shirt, Rahul has drawn comparisions from Congress loyalists with Lord Ram and a yogi with superhuman powers for being able to withstand the cold with little protection as well as the stamina to walk over 25 kilometres a day at a pace that has left many co-yatris out of breath.

The problem for Rahul is that a Lok Sabha election is not a test of physical fitness but of political strategy. In 2019, the BJP won 245 Lok Sabha seats out of a possible total of 323 seats in just 12 states – Uttar Pradesh (62/80), Madhya Pradesh (28/29), Rajasthan (25/25), Gujarat (26/26), Haryana (10/10), Himachal Pradesh (4/4), Uttarakhand (5/5), Karnataka (25/28), Maharashtra (23/48), Bihar (17/40), Jharkhand (11/14) and Assam (9/14).

Can it repeat this feat in 2024? It could lose ground in Karnataka, Rajasthan and Jharkhand. Despite the loss of allies in Maharashtra and Bihar, the BJP will benefit from contesting more seats in each of these two states than it did in 2019 when it gave the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena and Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) roughly equal number of seats to contest.

History shows that regional satraps will lay priority on consolidating their hold on their states rather than helping any one of their rivals becoming a consensus Opposition leader ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

This doesn’t mean Rahul’s yatra won’t deliver results. It has boosted his national profile. He has tried to banish the reputation of being a part-time leader who disappears abroad every few months.

But in politics, timing is everything. Rahul has possibly peaked too early. By February 2023 the yartra will be over. We will again see Rahul in a white kurta pyjama addressing campaign rallies. Will the periodic political gaffes still occur? Will the foreign trips restart? Will Rahul’s famed inaccessibility return?

Ideally, the Bharat Jodo Yatra should have been planned for September 2023-February 2024. It would have been the perfect momentum-builder for the April-May 2024 Lok Sabha election.

Modi knows a thing or two about timing. The newly constructed Ram Mandir will be thrown open to devotees in January-February 2024. By then Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Yatra would have faded from public memory.

The thankless task of moulding Opposition unity against the BJP could mirror the lukewarm reception the yatra received from the top tier of Opposition leaders: Mamata, Kejriwal, Akhilesh, Mayawati and Patnaik. Too many prime ministerial hopefuls, they know, spoil the electoral broth.

The writer is editor, author and publisher. Views expressed here are per personal.

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