Delhi Nyay Yatra (DNY): First phase ends, delivers Congress a reality check

As it concluded the first leg of its four-phase Delhi Nyay Yatra (DNY), on Tuesday (November 12), there was little to rejoice but plenty to reflect upon for the Congress party’s Delhi unit.

With polls in Delhi scheduled for early next year, the Congress is hoping that the public outreach campaign, fashioned after Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, would help the party re-open its account in the Assembly after a decade of crippling defeats.

Thin crowds

Led by Delhi Congress chief Devender Yadav and a band of the few local leaders who haven’t yet defected to the AAP or the BJP, the first phase of the DNY was flagged off from Rajghat on November 8. Over the next five days, it covered 16 of Delhi’s 70 Assembly segments.

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The thin crowds it drew in most localities, with the exception of areas like Chandni Chowk, Karol Bagh, Jahangirpuri and Badli must have served as a reality check for Yadav and his colleagues of how deep the party had fallen into the abyss of electoral irrelevance in the city-state it ruled for 15 long years before being swept aside by Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

With neither popular leaders nor a committed cadre in Delhi, the DNY has been pitched by Yadav as a means to revitalise the Congress ahead of the Delhi Assembly polls and to regain confidence of voters by “listening to the injustices they have suffered under the past decade” of BJP rule at the Centre and an AAP government in the state.

Yet, the party’s inability to move beyond the nostalgia of the “good old days” of late Sheila Dikshit’s chief ministerial tenure and its laboured attempts at attacking the AAP and the BJP for everything wrong in the national capital leave ordinary citizens more confounded than convinced of the Congress’s revival prospects. That the Congress high command and other bigwigs of the AICC, busy with the more pressing electoral battles underway in Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Wayanad, gave the DNY first phase a complete miss has only made things worse for the party’s Delhi unit.

Remembering Dikshit's 15-year reign

The perpetually thinning ranks of the Delhi Congress may draw some solace from the fact that curious onlookers along the yatra route still remembered Dikshit’s 15-year reign fondly but also concede that’s “hardly enough” to resuscitate the party in time for the assembly polls due end-January.

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“It’s a classic case of too little, too late. We have to accept that we are starting from zero... our base has shifted to the AAP, the leaders who could have filled the void left by Sheila ji, be it Ajay Maken, JP Aggarwal or Sandeep Dikshit, don’t appeal to the voters now, most of our second rung leadership has crossed over to the AAP or the BJP; and we have no real vision for the people of Delhi except reminding them of Sheila ji’s contributions and criticising everything that came after her... we don’t even know whether we are fighting for relevance, revival or survival,” a party veteran who served as minister in Dikshit’s government’s told The Federal.

The DNY’s message, according to the Delhi Congress chief, seems to rely on two broad narratives. First, that the “sapnon ki Dilli” (Delhi of dreams) built by Dikshit between 1998 and 2013 and second, that a “corrupt and pro-mafia” AAP and an “anti-people, anti-democracy” BJP had turned the national capital into a “living hell”.

That’s fine rhetoric but it does little to convince people of the Congress’s ability to electorally take on both these rivals.

What locals say about Congress

“What is left of the Congress in Delhi today? We have high regard for Sheila Dikshit but her time was in the past. The AAP is the present. It may not be all that Arvind Kejriwal said it would be when the party was launched but it has done so much... free electricity, mohalla clinics, good schools; even die-hard Congress workers have converted to AAP supporters in the past 10 years because of everything Kejriwal has done for the people,” Ratan Lal, a hardware shop owner in Karol Bagh, told this reporter as Yadav and his Delhi Yatris marched past his shop.

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In Kamla Market, Savita, who runs a grocery store with her husband, Chander Kumar, told The Federal that she participated in the DNY when it passed the locality “out of curiosity”. However, Savita asserted she would “vote for the AAP” irrespective of who the party fields because “Kejriwal, no one else, will form the government in Delhi” even as Chander interrupted her to add they were both “BJP supporters” but had been voting for the AAP since 2015, when Kejriwal first won his 67-seat unprecedented majority in the Assembly.

For 24-year-old Sahil Chopra, a resident of Jahangirpuri, the Congress has “no future” in Delhi. “Six months ago, they were fighting the Lok Sabha election in alliance with the AAP and today they are abusing Kejriwal and calling him a thug. If he is a thug, why did you ally with him? If their alliance had worked, if they had won, then they would not have any problem with AAP. The Congress keeps saying that they allied with AAP to keep BJP out of power, so what has changed now; by working against Kejriwal, are they not helping BJP... Congress can’t win anything on its own in Delhi but it is trying to split AAP’s vote,” Chopra claimed.

Lal, Savita and Chopra are just a few voices from Delhi but the common string running through their assertions is the lack of confidence they have in the Congress’s ability to turn a corner and a palpable anger at the party’s on again-off again relationship with the AAP.

'Congress has no presence left in Delhi'

Delhi Congress leaders too concede that their past dalliances with the AAP – before this year’s Lok Sabha tie-up, the Congress had extended outside support to Kejriwal’s first government, a minority one, back in 2013 – make it “near impossible” to convince even anti-AAP voters of the party’s tirade against its Delhi rival.

“We can keep telling the people that whenever we supported the AAP, it was only to keep the BJP out of power but who are we trying to convince with that line. The AAP’s voters, many of whom were once our voters, today are totally committed to Kejriwal while the anti-AAP voters are mostly those who traditionally vote for the BJP... there is only a small fraction of floating voters who may be unhappy with the AAP now but who also know that its either the AAP or the BJP who can form the government in Delhi because we literally have no presence left, so why would even this population vote for us when it knows that its vote will be wasted,” asks a former Congress MLA from South Delhi.

Many in the Delhi Congress believe that in Yadav, the state unit has found its most combative chief of the past decade but they also point out that a leader is “only as good as the team he has”. “Yadav is no doubt trying very hard but he can succeed only if he has a team that can put in double the effort on the ground and, sadly, this is where the DPCC is failing him... so many of our leaders have quit and more will quit in the run-up to the Assembly polls because they think it is easier to secure their political future if they are with the AAP or the BJP; all of this naturally demoralises ordinary party workers also; the DNY may infuse some energy in the party till it is on (the yatra will conclude on December 4) but the real work of keeping the momentum will begin only after that and for that we don’t have dedicated people anymore... it is the same thing that happened with Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra in states like MP, UP and Bihar,” a former Delhi Congress chief said.

Party insiders say the Congress was hopeful of regaining lost ground at least in constituencies where the Muslim community has a significant population because of the AAP’s fluid commitment towards secularism and its dubious role during the 2022 Northeast Delhi riots. This was, perhaps, one of the reasons why the first leg of the DNY included constituencies in Central and North Delhi that have a substantial chunk of Muslim voters.

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However, the Congress's inability to stem the attrition of its leaders and, more importantly, directly address the concerns of the religious minority has dented these aspirations too. The party received a major jolt on the third day of the DNY when its Muslim strongman from Seelampur, former MLA Mateen Ahmed switched to the AAP. Having already built up MLAs Shoaib Iqbal and Amanatullah Khan as its prominent Muslim faces in Central and South Delhi, respectively, Ahmed’s cross-over now gives the AAP a major Muslim face in Northeast Delhi too, a supposedly ‘weak’ area for the party as it attempts to regain the community’s trust.

After a two-day recess, the DNY will resume for its second leg, covering 18 constituencies, from November 15 and then have another phase from November 22 to November 26 before it concludes with a final lap across 20 constituencies between November 29 and December 4.

With the Assembly poll results for Jharkhand and Maharashtra due on November 23, the Delhi Congress is hoping that their central leadership, including party chief Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, will join at least the last phase of the DNY and bring with them the gravitas, political heft and electoral clarity that the party is desperately in need of. Until then, the Delhi Congress has much food for thought to chew on.