BHARAT JODO YATRA, OR A CONGRESS THODO YATRA?

Let me start with a caveat. This is a not a political piece. The idea is to assess the marketing and brand strategy of India’s grand old party.

For novices, Bharat Jodo Yatra was a long walk from India’s South to its North undertaken by Rahul Gandhi, the designated and reluctant crown prince of India’s Congress party. His family ruled India for 41 years between 1947 and 2023. In 2014, and 2019 general elections, they lost to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. The party has been suffering losses in the states too. Rahul himself had to surrender his family fiefdom and retreat to a bastion in the South. 

As a reluctant leader, he has always shrugged responsibility for failures. The organization is lying on its death bed. But the party is no stranger to rough weather in politics. Several generations of his predecessors have gone through this phase, only to emerge stronger as time passes. The fate of democracies is always unpredictable. The world’s largest democracy is no different. Adding to this chaos are 1.4 billion people conversing in 19,500 living languages and brandishing 705+ tribal identities and belonging to thousands of castes and creeds! 

So Rahul embarked on a long trip to walk through and absorb this magical chaos. He was emulating Mahatma Gandhi who undertook such a trip in a train on the advise of his peers. Gandhi got to know India, and in a few years, Indians got to know Gandhi. People embraced him for his simplicity, his stunning depth of compassion and the wisdom he brought to India’s freedom struggle. 

Rahul Gandhi lacks all of this. His disoriented speech on important topics that mattered to the country has been distasteful on several occasions. Some were simply slips of the tongue that were brought about by sloppy preparation and lack of rehearsal. Others mirrored the genuine lack of intellect. It is not all his fault, but the failure of the yes-men who surround him. They feed him with wrong content which only serve their interest and not that of the young scion. 

Rahul has always be surrounded by moss like this. His mother and he comprise a comical leadership establishment in the party, called the ‘high-command’. They make all the leadership decisions in the states. Their yes-men promoted incompetent leaders in the states, who never understood the pulse of India’s masses. 

The vote share of the Congress has progressively eroded from 45% in 1952 to 19.5% in 2019. The performance in the state polls have been abysmal. In many states, the Congress has even lost out to regional parties who owned less than 2% of the vote share in national elections (We will come back to why these numbers are important in a while). Look at the whole picture, and the Congress needs massive publicity stunts to win back the mind space it has lost to its competitors. 

The Bharat Jodo Yatra was put together by strategy consultants who charge millions of dollars for doing political campaigns. Therefore marketers should take this as an opportunity to hone their craft.  There were eight major strategic mistakes made by the Congress party in the much-touted yatra. 

1. Leaders take charge of failures, not victories: The high-command leadership system of the Congress prevents any fruitful debates. Octogenarian yes-men discuss archaic ideas and use these debates as opportunities to lick the feet of their leaders. Knowledgeable people – and there are a lot of them in the Congress party – are kept off power centers. Their ideas are painted with the colors of heresy. The party is now drained of able men. They left in hordes. In short, the leadership incentivized servitude and honored the servants, even at the cost of shooting itself in the arm many times over. After each failure, the leaders servants brought out voluminous reports whose only aim was to absolve the leader of all responsibility. Often provincial leaders were dismissed at the drop of a hat. Rahul has never displayed his courage to own responsibility for failures.
2. Positioning, Positioning, Positioning: The BJP is a strong opponent. Rahul’s Yatra shared the stage with over fifty regional parties. Most of these parties stand at opposite ends on most critical issues now facing the country. How do you convince 1.4 billion people that this coterie of cacophony will address India’s problems. The press tuned in, but no answers were heard.
3. Perception is the only reality: What does the Congress intend to communicate when they say millions of India’s matchstick regional parties should put their weights behind the grand old party to oppose the BJP? It only tells the masses that the BJP is India’s strongest and most loved party. Unintentionally, the Congress is communicating that the opponent is the single best choice before this country, NOT them.
4. How do customers assess brand performance? Customers buy things all the time without understanding technical nuances. We buy cars without knowing the science that powers it. We buy homes without understanding cement chemistry. We buy clothes without knowing the science of the fibers. And we vote perceptions to political offices, NOT parties or persons. It is the role of brand managers to create these perceptions and communicate the yardstick that customers should use to evaluate their performance. If you want to be assessed on quality, say so and give the customers reasons to believe. The Congress has raised a million issues from minority rights to corruption with not a dirt of proof to prove its point. That leads to erosion of brand trust.
5. The product must evolve with the times: Times change. Customers’ expectations shift. Technology and economics change. Brands must keep up. From Royal Enfield to Hamara Bajaj to Lifebuoy soaps, everything has changed between Nehru’s India and Rahul’s. These brands are still alive. In fact, they are giving their younger siblings a run for their money. The Congresses’ toolkit has to evolve. India is today the world’s fifth largest economy. India@75 is a different animal than India@10. What is the benefit the Congress now intends to give its customers – the voting common man
6. It’s the failures that leaders should fix first: Rahul’s yatra covered 4080 kilometers in over 150 days. But most of the time was spent in places where the party or its allies had significant presence. No effort was made to speak to party workers where the party was weak and strengthen the areas that needed to be strengthened. In some large states, the yatra lasted just a few hours. Some places where immediate attention was required were ignored entirely. This is not the hallmark of a leader, but of an opportunist who was quick to seek credit for having harvested the low-hanging fruits.
7. Who is your partner, and who is your competitor? Every leader has to have a strategy. How do you deal with competitors? How do you deal with partners? How do you deal with today’s partners who may well become tomorrow’s competition and vice versa? Congress’s strategy notebook is a muddle. It has no beginning and no end. Many regional satraps were invited to the opening and closing events of the yatra. But the party failed to communicate its gameplan to the people. All these days were wasted. 
8. You build your strategy on your strengths, not on the competition’s weakness: Rahul has been spending all his time to oppose his opponents. But the grand finale in Kashmir added a feather to Modi’s crown. Until 2019, Kashmir was a melting pot of separatism. It was an epitome of whatever was wrong with the notion of India. Rahul’s own party fanned the flames for petty political gains. Millions of Hindus were evicted from the state. Modi took charge and quelled the rebellion. The flames were reduced to mere occasional sparks. When Rahul walked through the streets of Kashmir, he proved to the rest of India that Modi was successful as a strategist who managed to bring peace and order back to the paradise on earth.

India needs a strong opposition. Every democracy needs it. The Congress now needs to reinvent the show by changing the rules of the game. Its gameplan draws from historic figures – Gandhi, Godse, Savarkar… Those men and their aura are long dead and gone. Young Indians do not know much about these people. They don’t care. 

The Aam Admi Party in Delhi rode to power on the backs of India’s lower middle class – who bear the daily pain of earning a living. They were sick of the policemen who sought bribes every day while they struggled to keep their skin and bones together. Their vote was a revolt. The same policemen make a killing today. But can Rahul stand up for India’s suffering masses here and everywhere else? What will he do to make India grow faster? Those are answers a rising India seeks from its leaders. The nation wants to leave the festering wounds behind and move forward. Can the Congress party deliver on this new brief?

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