BY S VENKAT NARAYAN
Our Special Correspondent
NEW DELHI, October 8: Sonia Gandhi, the Interim President of India’s opposition Congress Party, participated in the party’s ongoing Bharat Jodo Yatra (Unify India Foot March) in the Mandya district of Karnataka state. The padyatra, led by her son Rahul Gandhi, started in Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu on September 7 will cover over a period of five months 3,570 kilometers across India. It will terminate in Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir.
The Congress Party has been suffering humiliating defeats in the Lok Sabha and State Assembly elections since 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stormed into power on a campaign to make India Congress-mukt, or Congress-free.The Gandhis and their loyalists in the party hope that the ambitious long march by foot will rejuvenate the party’s dwindling cadres and attract the voters at large to take on Modi and the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and upcoming elections in several states.
