Rahul Gandhi's Telangana padyatra: Good for farmers or Congress?

After spending his first night in Telangana, the state promised by his mother Sonia Gandhi in the run-up to the 2004 and 2009 polls and delivered finally ahead of the 2014 polls, Rahul Gandhi travelled under the sweltering summer sun on the dusty roads of Adilabad district, consoling the families of five farmers who had snuffed their lives out. To suggest Rahul Gandhi meant business, instead of driving out after dusk from Hyderabad, he took an alternative route, from Delhi to the Sikh shrine town of Nanded in Maharashtra and then drove down to Nirmal in Adilabad to stay for the night at the specially refurbished room at the modest Mayura Inn Hotel, before waking up on Friday, for the testing part of his journey.

Visiting the villages on a 15km stretch, in about five-and-a-half hours, he did make a first-hand appraisal of how the agrarian distress loomed large, first on the breadwinner and then, after his suicide, the entire family. Unlike his earlier marches in Punjab, and the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra with a similar stated goal about fathoming farmers' financial condition and issues faced in the rural belt, Rahul Gandhi, by calling on the five families, knew that there are five things that he cannot forget.

Discovering from the conversations with the families that there is need for a structural solution to the recurring suicides, Rahul Gandhi also knows the whittled down implementation of loan waiver has left farmers in a state of helplessness. The Congress government should have also put into effect the MS Swaminathan Committee report that examined the factors for indebtedness in depth.

Instilling confidence in farmers is seldom achieved by giving a dole of Rs two lakh each to the families visited on behalf of the party while ignoring many others. What makes it worse is that in a pre-emptive move, the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) leaders visited the same families last week and gave Rs 1.60 lakh each.

Capitalising on agrarian distress is not just handy for the Congress, given the misgivings about recent measures initiated by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, but can serve as an enduring rural connect if the party is sensitive about farmers' issues and more that will crop up in the wake of the latest forecasts about the El Nino factor weakening India’s main monsoon rains that are expected to reach Kerala on May 30.

Giving Hyderabad a miss and in the process, avoiding the clusters of the Congress supporters who rallied at different places en route, besides decorating the road leading to Nirmal, a 230km drive for him, with billboards, cut-outs, posters and festoons, spending lakhs of rupees, should have been avoided so that disappointed party activists do not turn disillusioned. Or else, he should have insisted that there is no need for a celebratory welcome in keeping with the purpose of his padyatra.

Reviving the Congress in Telangana is a daunting task because complacent leaders have spent most of their time, after the state’s formation on June 2 last year, attending to their personal issues rather than introspect and devote time strengthening the party so that it does not yield space to any other as the chief opponent of the TRS. Its founder and Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao is dismissive. Ahead of the rythu bharosa padyatra, he declared: "These Gandhis would come and go." Therein is the challenge for the Congress and Rahul Gandhi.