Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Monday said that the Bharat Jodo Yatra not only helped him connect and communicate directly with people but also introduced the idea of “love in the Indian political system”.
Talking to the students at the Texas University here, Gandhi said, “Why I walked four thousand kilometers — what created the need for us to do this? The reason is that all avenues of communication in India were shut. No matter what we did, everything was blocked. We spoke in Parliament, but it wasn’t televised. We went to the media, but they didn’t pick up what we said.”
“We even presented documents to the legal system, but nothing happened. So, all the avenues were closed, and for a long time, we literally couldn’t understand how to communicate. Then suddenly, we hit upon the idea: if the media isn’t reaching the masses and institutions aren’t connecting us with the people, go directly to them. The best way to do that was to literally walk across the country. And so, that’s what we did,” Gandhi said.
He recalled how he made up his mind to undertake this historic yatra of walking across the country, despite having a knee problem.
“In the beginning, I must tell you, I had a knee problem. For the first 3-4 days, I thought, What have I done? Because when you wake up in the morning and say, I’ll run 10 kilometers, it’s fine. But when you wake up and say, I’ll walk 4,000 kilometers, it’s a completely different paradigm. There were moments like that, where I thought, This is quite a big thing. But surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult at all,” the Raebareli MP said.
Gandhi added, “And it fundamentally changed the way I think about my work. I would say it completely changed how I view politics, how I view our people, how I communicate with them, and how I listen to them. It wasn’t just me — many people were involved in the Yatra”.
He said that during the Bharat Jodo Yatra what happened without a plan was the “introduction of the idea of love in politics”.
He said that in the current political discourse in most of the countries “one cannot find the word love” as it does not exist in that context.
“You’ll find hatred, anger, unfairness, corruption — all these words — but rarely the word ‘love’. The Bharat Jodo Yatra actually introduced that idea into the Indian political system, and I’ve been amazed at how well that idea has worked,” the former Congress president said.
