Could it be presumptuous to say that Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra has appeared somewhat purposeful because it has produced millions of happy images of the Congress leader and all those who have walked alongside him? Is it the power of these images, which has created a caravan of good cheer and hope that has fixed his image problem, eventually?
Every single day on the yatra route, people have clicked pictures and produced reels of Rahul Gandhi walking, jogging or running with their smartphones. They uploaded it on their social media accounts instantly, not to pedantically tell the world that they were witnesses to history, but to casually announce their access to a celebrity.
Rahul Gandhi was a celebrity they had until then seen at a distance, in newspapers, on television screens surrounded by gun-toting policemen, and transported in an intimidating cavalcade of SUVs, jammer vans and ambulances. There was an eerie uncertainty about the person each time the cavalcade passed with screeching sirens. But the yatra has been nothing about this familiar circulation of scenes. They are fresh images that break all barriers. They create intimacy because of the proximity.
The pictures flooding social media timelines are not just of Rahul Gandhi. He is not alone as the subject of the photograph. The person taking the picture is as much the subject. Smartphones allow the camera to flip and put the photographer and the photographed in the same frame. That is sheer magic. This has never happened before, where the whole nation on the yatra path gets a chance to be part of the frame. It is as if Rahul Gandhi has been taking out a selfie yatra in the age of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Hitherto, those who accessed Rahul Gandhi had a certain privilege, or he should have designed to give them an audience. But now, he is passing by your street, your shop, your temple, your mall, your mosque, your church, your home, your doorstep, your balcony, and he is inviting you to be with him—to celebrate with him, to dance and run and eat and share with him. It may all be transient, and it may still be an unequal interaction, but that is essentially the nature of the intimate orchestra that social media arranges in our lives out of alien moments, and it has done so for this yatra too.
Suddenly Rahul Gandhi has assumed a kinship relationship with the unknown public through smartphone cameras. There are no strangers on the yatra route, for the camera has made him a brother or an avuncular figure—especially the benign unmarried type we see in Indian families. These uncles are self-sufficient, argumentative, dog-loving, indulgent, compassionate souls who lend an ear to every grouse that a niece or nephew may have against his or her parents or their labyrinthine emotional worlds.
One glance at the gallery of images of the yatra produces a feel-good (acche din) emotion that the nation has either been pretending to be experiencing or struggling to summon for a long time. There are children riding on his shoulders; there are women walking hand-in-hand; there are the elderly whose furrows carry a burden greater than that of Rahul Gandhi; there are indulgent mothers; there are politicians who look lost without their paraphernalia of power; there are performers lost in a song; there are dancers lost in their step; there is a full public display of emotion; there is a fancy dress; there are myriad colours, and there is an unprecedented celebration in the middle of the road. All this makes one wonder if this is all real. Exactly like we feel when lost in bubbles that social media timelines so competently create. Rahul Gandhi, with the growing length of his beard, becomes a monk, a mendicant, a godman lookalike, or simply a Laal Singh Chadda, an avatar of Forrest Gump, who gathers a crowd as he walks.
When Rahul Gandhi especially walked hand in hand with young women, they felt secure, they did not feel compelled to label him as a brother or a friend, they did not have to answer anybody, and there was a reclamation of the public space for them. As his yatra progressed, in faraway lands like Iran and Afghanistan, women were fighting moral police for their basic freedoms. There was also an answer to the vulgarity with which his great-grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru’s images with women were spun around by saffron trolls. In a yatra against hate, he had avenged something.
A picture to frame is everybody’s takeaway from the yatra. Rahul Gandhi will be where Narendra Modi has not been, on alien fluorescent and pastel walls as an alien family relative. Modi aspires to be with the pantheon of gods on the walls, while Rahul Gandhi will sit with the family because there is a family member in the picture. Perhaps the yatra has unleashed something that Rahul Gandhi had not imagined. Till yesterday, he was a distant prince of a powerful dynasty in a barricaded palace. Today he is in the homes of people.
It is a coup that Narendra Modi perhaps did not expect. It may have nothing to do with electoral outcomes, but it may be like Diana’s fate, which the Netflix series, Crown, has reminded us of yet again. She lost the throne but became the ‘queen of hearts’. A title she created for herself, independent of the royalty she belonged to. It was about her and the people who felt her warmth. All the photographic moments of Rahul Gandhi’s yatra contrast with Modi’s photographic experience, whatever has become apparent to us.
There are videos often circulated on social media, which show that Modi wants to be alone in his frame. People are being hushed away from the Modi frame, but in the Rahul Gandhi frame, people are crowding every moment. People are being pulled into it, not pushed away.
Modi grew his beard at a moment of Covid distress—it was a ritual. A vrath (ritual resolve) and a vow that grew from religiosity. Rahul Gandhi has allowed his beard to seek purposeless joy in its length. It is not like the stubble of his earlier boredom. There is such abandon that it becomes a filter of freedom for all the breeze that passes through it. Rahul Gandhi himself would speak of it in spiritual terms, but his actions have greater power than his words. Therefore, he should desist from interpreting it.
Sugata Srinivasaraju
Senior journalist and author