In a deliberate emulation of India’s revered independence hero Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the nation’s major opposition chief at current is on the ultimate leg of a mammoth public stroll throughout the size of the subcontinent.

Defying critics and sceptics, the three,500km (2,175 miles) stroll by Rahul Gandhi — no relation to the liberty fighter — has succeeded as each political protest and mobilisation. Over the final three months, the Bharat Jodo Yatra or the March for the Unity of India has been met with widespread enthusiasm.

Now in its final part, the yatra entered the northern state of Punjab on Tuesday evening because it makes its strategy to its conclusion on the excessive peaks of Indian-administered Kashmir. In strolling so lengthy, Gandhi — the face of the Indian National Congress — is providing the world’s largest democracy a brand new political imaginative and prescient and script pitched in opposition to the shrill political Hinduism or Hindutva of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The intention of the yatra, a time period often related to a Hindu pilgrimage, is political redemption. It has reignited the Congress occasion that had been immobilised for a decade with serial electoral defeats. Mocked mercilessly by the BJP as an novice politician, Gandhi has emerged immediately as a pacesetter with mass enchantment.

With a easy message of interreligious concord and prosperity for all, the epic stroll has focussed on widespread human interactions. At every cease on daily basis, Gandhi’s aides doc and disseminate on social media the conversations their chief has with farmers and staff, younger and outdated, women and men and youngsters too about their shattered goals below the Modi authorities. These seize a snapshot of the lived realities of the Indian economic system, the place unemployment and inflation are excessive, with a authorities that has been excessive on guarantees and low on their supply.

Gandhi’s message is that Modi’s strident Hindutva is what is weakening the financial and social potential of India. All this and the accompanying clamour for hugs and selfies with the bearded opposition chief have charged a political and media panorama that has in any other case been monopolised by Modi. For the primary time since his ascent, Modi has been rendered silent.

The political message is certainly that of a conflict between a multicultural or secular polity on the one hand and Hindu supremacist insurance policies on the opposite. But it’s clear that the march is framing that battle as additionally being led by two very totally different sorts of males who now animate and divide Indians.

Modi and the BJP have lengthy railed in opposition to India’s secular politics typified by Gandhi’s household as embodying corruption and decay that they declare have denied India its rightful place on this planet order. Gandhi’s great-grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru, grandmother Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv Gandhi all served as prime ministers.

Two huge majority mandates for Modi, in 2014 and 2019, have helped to cloak violent Hindutva within the guise of well-liked anger in opposition to entrenched political elites. Modi has original himself as a powerful however populist everyman who has risen in opposition to this so-called ancien regime.

Today, from legal guidelines to political rhetoric, Modi embodies an aggressive “Hindu first” agenda for India. From proposed laws that introduces religious discrimination in citizenship to the routine violence in opposition to minorities, Modi’s agenda for cultural uniformity is in search of to drastically recast India.

At 52, Gandhi has lengthy been vilified as a fourth-generation dynast. Yet exactly due to his household historical past, he has lengthy and intimate data of energy and violence. Both his grandmother and father had been assassinated. Shunning political workplace and the trimmings of energy, Gandhi has immersed himself in pursuing a direct relationship with the folks. He seems to have understood that Modi’s strongman ways might be countered solely with the facility of shared vulnerability that brings collectively everybody who’s lower than absolutely dedicated to Hindutva and has — as a consequence — felt the sharp wedge of authority that stalks India’s public life.

If Modi has expressed his political energy by way of authority and populism, then Gandhi has sought a compassionate connection. In in search of a horizontal coalition of various sections of India, the yatra’s message is to empower a politics of fearlessness. In so doing, it seeks to rediscover the rules of range and fairness which have been foundational to unbiased India. Strikingly, the yatra has emphasised a easy political script of feelings resembling love, fellowship and sacrifice to blunt and counter the dominant narratives of violence and identification.

About a century in the past, the well-known salt march of Gandhi – the Father of the Nation – thwarted the British empire and Indian political elites alike as he shunned political workplace and energy however lit up widespread Indians with audacious hope. He was looking for a metamorphosis of politics and a redefinition of political relationships. He succeeded.

It can be ridiculous and foolhardy to check the 2 Gandhis. The contest immediately just isn’t in regards to the overthrowing of a international imperial energy. It is a completely inside and intimate alternative in regards to the future identification of India.

But in providing a political paradigm totally different from that projected by Modi and the BJP, the Bharat Jodo Yatra has helped demarcate the battle traces for 2024, when the subsequent nationwide elections are scheduled to happen. After being overwhelmed by Modi and Hindutva for almost a decade, Indian democracy may lastly be prepared for an actual contest of ideologies, feelings and personalities.

The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.