Do Indians still want the Congress party’s secular politics?
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThe “Bharat Jodo Yatra” is an effort to boost Congress and its leader ahead of the general election due next year. Both badly need it. Congress, which as recently as 2009 won twice as many seats as its Hindu nationalist opponent, the Bharatiya Janata Party , risks becoming an electoral irrelevance. It controls just three of India’s 28 states and less than 10% of seats in the lower house of parliament.
A scion of Congress’ ruling dynasty—a son, grandson and great-grandson of prime ministers—he began his walk at India’s southern tip last September. By the time it concludes in Kashmir on January 30th he will have covered over 2,200 miles. Even by India’s tradition of political marches, this is a sterling effort. Mohandas Gandhi walked 240 miles on his Salt March of 1930, a seminal act of civil disobedience; a previousleader completed a similar route to Mr Gandhi in 1991 by car.
Yet even if Mr Gandhi is a better politician than many Indians believe, he could not reverse Congress’s fortunes alone. Several failed attempts to boost the party by promoting its princeling leader have already proved that. Rather, Congress, a squabbling left-leaning coalition arraigned around its ruling family, needs to re-establish what it stands for.
Rallying Hindus against the other 20% of India’s population has helped paper over deep differences of caste and class within the majority group. It has also been so successful in redefining Indian nationalism as a Hindu cause that theis able to deride its secular critics as unpatriotic. For many Indians, secularism and anti-Indianism have become, if not synonymous, then related.
Mr Gandhi appears to be trying to do so by reaching beyond his atheist grandfather to the interfaith harmony preached by Mohandas Gandhi. He has walked parts of the, a red mark connoting Hindu piety. He has referred to the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu text, in presenting the
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