As Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ enters its 12th day, RaGa with his party workers resumed the Padyatra from Punnapra Aravukad, Alappuzha on Monday.
More than 200 kilometres have been covered so far in the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ campaign. The Congress leaders had earlier resumed the Kerala leg of the yatra on Sunday morning from Haripad in the Alappuzha district. The padyatra will stop at the Sree Kuruttu Bhagavathi Temple in Thottappally.
The Yatra will halt at TD Medical College and Hospital, Vandanam, in the evening. The yatra is still in its Kerala leg and is supposed to traverse through the state for the next 12 days.
The 3,500 km march from Kanyakumari to Kashmir will take 150 days to complete and pass through up to 12 states. The Yatra will depart from Kerala and travel through the state for the following 18 days before arriving in Karnataka on September 30. Before travelling further north, it will spend 21 days in Karnataka. Every day, the Padyatra will travel 25 kilometres.
Kerala Congress suspended three party workers following the recent activities that surfaced over the web concerning the party workers. A vegetable shopkeeper in Kollam allegedly received threats from Congress members for failing to donate Rs. 2,000 to the effort to raise money for the Bharat Jodo Yatra.
The owner of a vegetable shop in Kollam, S. Fawaz, said that Congress employees had destroyed vegetables and damaged the shop’s weighing machine. He further claimed that the Congress workers wreaked havoc and assaulted the shop’s employees.
Kerala Congress Chief K Sudhakaran said in a tweet, “Three party workers involved in an unacceptable incident in Kollam have been suspended with immediate effect. They do not represent our ideology and such behaviour is inexcusable. The party is crowdfunding small donations voluntarily unlike others who get corporate donations.”
The opposition to the INC, the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) criticized the Rahul Gandhi led ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ referring to the yatra as ‘Goonda Yatra’. BJP’s spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla said that the Congress Party is using goons all over the nation as part of its ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’.
“The Yatra is a fight against exploitation”, said Rahul Gandhi. Gandhi through his twitter post said, “Without harmony, there is no progress Without progress, there are no jobs Without jobs, there is no future, the #BharatJodoYatra is uniting the voices of despair, to break the shackles of unemployment.”
Notably, Rahul Gandhi and all of the party’s MPs, leaders, and employees are remaining put. Some of the containers even have AC units, toilets, and sleeping mattresses. There will be numerous different climate and environmental conditions along the way. The arrangements were made with the new destination’s extreme heat and humidity in mind. Assembly elections for the Congress were a disaster earlier this year, and the Yatra is considered as an effort to motivate party members for the upcoming electoral skirmishes.
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