So little has been written about Rahul’s Nyay Yatra that one starts suspecting if there is a conspiracy to invisibilise the whole affair. This is Rahul’s second Bharat Yatra. He is the only leader in post-Independence India who not only once, but twice, has gone from one end of India to another. It’s a courageous attempt. This is a mass contact programme to reinvent the Congress which was once a colossus and is now riddled with serious ailments. The first Yatra helped the Congress to change its image and catapulted Rahul to being a serious political figure at a time when a million dollar industry is out to destroy his image and that of the Congress. I know that at a time when entire media industry is duty bound to create a cult with mythical powers around Narendra Modi, this was indeed a Herculean task, but Rahul did it. It is another matter that he will not get the respect that he deserves.

If the first Yatra was to understand India, to feel the pulse of the people at a time when the social fabric of the nation is changing rapidly, then the second is to discover the ideological alternative to BJP’s Hindutva. No doubt, in the first one, Rahul laid the foundation of the ideological edifice which is needed to challenge the might of the RSS’s social mission and BJP’s political goal. He successfully conveyed the message that the country had to be saved from the poison of communalism and the the binary of Hindu Muslim divide which had been created to fulfil the bigger agenda of Hindutva, ie to construct the utopia called Hindu Rashtra in which Muslims are treated as second-class citizens. His slogan, that he has come to “open the shop of love in the marketplace of hate”, conveyed it all. The........

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