JOIN USAn America Jodo Yatra? Well, well, someone did think to suggest
“Will you also walk across America, even though we may not quite have a Stalin-Gandhi pact here?” asked a famous Hollywood comedian to Rahul Gandhi in a private meeting in New York with nearly 50 successful Indian-Americans from the performing arts, movies, music and culture sectors. The room erupted in laughter.
The question was in reference to Gandhi’s now iconic 4,000-km walk, the Bharat Jodo Yatra, that commenced in Kanyakumari with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin handing over the national flag to Rahul Gandhi. The comedian hinted that America, too, sorely needs such an impactful form of political action in spreading the message of love and harmony and healing its divisions, but that there was no American political leader with both the physical and mental strength to undertake such a ‘long march’.
This light-hearted banter encapsulates the extraordinary reception that Rahul Gandhi received on his six-day tour of America last week. I had the fortune of traveling and attending every event with Gandhi on this historic US tour.
In six days, 17 events and meetings across three cities from the west coast to the east coast of America, Rahul Gandhi was inundated with questions about the politics of hate versus the politics of love, which was the essence of his yatra. The idea of the yatra and its central message of harmony seems to have captured the imagination of most of the politically aware Indian-Americans. When Rahul Gandhi narrated incidents from the yatra to explain the difference between power and force, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, to nearly a thousand students packed into the Cemex auditorium at Stanford University, there was rousing applause. Dreams of the next big start-up and unicorn are expected to preoccupy the minds of Stanford students in Silicon Valley, not the state of politics in distant India. But when even Stanford students were captivated by stories of a long march by a bearded Indian political leader, it became evident to us that the Bharat Jodo Yatra had become a global political brand.
In hindsight, perhaps it is only apt that a political action for love and harmony among citizens should resonate strongly in the epicentre of technology. After all, it is their homegrown companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter that bear the cross for extreme divisions and polarisation in politics across most democracies in the world. Just as the fountainhead of wide economic disparities between the rich and the poor lies in Wall Street in New York, the seeds of social disparities and hatred were sown in the Silicon Valley in California.
If the yatra captured the imagination of people for its unique political action and message, Rahul Gandhi called for a similar act of imagination in geopolitics and global affairs. When he emphasised that “Indian democracy is a global public good”, academics, scholars and foreign policy strategists took notes. He argued that in the new bipolar world order of a non-democratic but economically powerful China-Russia bloc of nations versus a democratic but economically declining Western bloc of nations, India holds the balance of power. A democratic India that is also economically powerful is the sole weapon that can tilt the balance, he reasoned. Hence, the state of both India’s democracy and economy should be a global concern was his deduction.
In this context, Gandhi called for a stronger and broader partnership between India and the US that is not confined primarily to a military alliance but extends to the entire spectrum of economy, health, agriculture and public infrastructure. A new ‘Marshall Plan’ type of partnership between India and America can be a new act of geopolitical imagination, he said, alluding to the post-World War II plan under which America helped the reconstruction of Europe through a very strong economic partnership that proved to be a ‘win-win’ for both continents and paved the path for Western supremacy and American ‘exceptionalism’.
There were the inevitable questions about the state of India’s democracy. To be clear, in today’s hyper-connected world, the decline of India’s democratic structure is no secret, and it is foolish to believe that it needs a Rahul Gandhi to articulate this to others. Rahul’s categorical response to the question of the perilous state of Indian democracy was that while India’s democracy may be in peril with complete institutional capture by the ruling party, its revival can come only from the people of India through the means of creative and renewed Opposition politics, and not from any outsider.
After nearly every interaction, be it with students at Stanford or journalists at the National Press Club or scholars from thinktanks, there was always a remark at the end expressed in the form of a wish – we hope Prime Minister Modi too interacts with us in a similar free-wheeling manner when he visits America in a few days. I hope so, too.
Looking back, I can now understand why the government tried hard to sabotage Rahul’s America visit by delaying his passport until the last minute and making him run to the High Court for permission to travel. Ironically, when we landed in San Francisco airport after a 16-hour flight and had to wait in a long line for another hour and a half to clear immigration – since Rahul Gandhi is no longer a MP with diplomatic protocols, he was besieged with requests for selfies by hundreds of others in the queue, much to the amusement and chagrin of American immigration officers. The enormous interest and curiosity about his yatra, his politics of love, and his vision -- from students to academicians to intellectuals to businessfolk to ‘culturistas’ to taxi drivers to the common Indian-American -- caught even us by surprise.