Rahul to kick off Bharat Nyay Yatra from Jan 14

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi will undertake a 6,200km-long Bharat Nyay Yatra from the northeastern tip of India to its western shore between January and March, the party announced on Wednesday, in what is a reiteration of a Kanyakumari-to-Kashmir Bharat Jodo foot march that galvanised workers but produced mixed electoral dividends.

- Saubhadra Chatterji

MANIPUR TO MAHARASHTRA

Congress general secretary KC Venugopal said the yatra will begin on January 14 in violence-torn Manipur and end on March 20 in Mumbai, covering 14 states and 85 districts, largely by bus and on foot, and end just weeks before general elections next summer.

The route will cover Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, Meghalaya, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Nine of these states were not covered in the Bharat Jodo Yatra in 2022-23.

“It will end at Mumbai on March 20,” Venugopal said. Party chief Mallikarjun Kharge will flag off the yatra in Imphal.

Gandhi was under pressure from his party colleagues to undertake another yatra in the last few months. In the last meeting of the Congress Working Committee on December 21, nearly all participants urged the former party chief to undertake another cross-country march on the lines of the 4,500km-long Bharat Jodo Yatra, which began in Kanyakumari in September 2022 and ended in Srinagar on January 30. This time, Gandhi will use a bus for large chunks of the journey instead of walking the whole distance. Gandhi had told them that he would do whatever the party asked him to.