Lengthy, full, philosopher-grade. Folks on the route discover it earlier than they discover anything. Some say it makes him seem like a sadhu. Others, much less charitably, say it makes him seem like he misplaced a wager. To most, his beard seems to be like Rahul Gandhi’s when he was on his Bharat Jodo Yatra throughout the nation. Singh himself appears unbothered by any of those descriptions.

It was barely 11 am when ThePrint caught up with him at Jagat Singh Punia’s home close to the Karnal bypass—a cup of tea with scorching vegetable fritters, a drawing room filled with native Congress staff, a schedule sheet itemizing 17 stops between right here and an evening halt on the Jaat Dharamshala.

That is what the Sadbhav Yatra seems to be like from the within, 5 months in: Not a procession a lot as a perpetual movement machine, modest in its mechanics, cussed in its goal.

From Punia’s home, Brijendra Singh and some hundred walked to Sir Chhotu Ram Chowk, the place Singh bowed on the statue of the agrarian reformer. A couple of others adopted in vehicles.

The gesture had layers. Deenbandhu Sir Chhotu Ram, who spent his life in early Twentieth-century undivided Punjab combating for farmers and the agricultural poor, can also be Brijendra Singh’s great-grandfather—his grandfather Neki Ram Sheokand, a minister beneath Bansi Lal’s Haryana authorities, had married Sir Chhotu Ram’s daughter.

“The respect one will get due to this legacy is in a means a boon in addition to a burden,” Singh stated later, with the slight smile of a person who has given this reply many occasions and nonetheless means it.

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The yatra no person anticipated

To grasp why Brijendra Singh is doing this, you must return to the night of 8 October, 2024, when the Haryana election outcomes trickled in and quietly demolished most of what the Congress had assumed about itself. The get together had been doing effectively, the temper on the bottom appeared optimistic, and there was a consensus that the BJP’s uninterrupted years in energy in Haryana had been completed. They weren’t. The BJP gained for the third time.

The Congress misplaced Uchana Kalan, amongst many different seats, with Brijendra Singh himself taking place by 32 votes. Thirty-two. He has gone to courtroom looking for a recount.

What adopted, Singh stated, was a peculiar silence. “There was a common impression that the Opposition had disappeared. Staff had been disheartened. Folks had been disheartened. Despondency had set in amongst Congress staff and individuals who had been ready for its authorities to return after the meeting outcomes had been introduced.”

The get together’s senior management within the state appeared to retreat into quiet. It was on this vacuum that Singh started occupied with the yatra.

He earlier informed ThePrint that he mentioned the thought with Rahul Gandhi. Gandhi accepted it. The Sadbhav Yatra started on 5 October 2025, from Danoda village in Narwana. Notably, when it began, neither Hooda nor state Congress president Rao Narendra Singh was current on the flag-off. A number of different senior Congress leaders, nevertheless, together with Kumari Selja, Randeep Singh Surjewala and Captain Ajay Singh Yadav, have joined his yatra.

Some Congress leaders referred to as it a “private yatra”. Requested about this, Singh was diplomatic. He stays so now. “The issue is with leaders, not staff,” he had stated on the time. On Friday in Kaithal, he didn’t increase the topic however when requested, moved on shortly. The yatra, no matter its origins in intra-party arithmetic, has by now developed a lifetime of its personal.

5 months, 57 constituencies

The route of the Sadbhav Yatra is, in its personal means, is a map of Haryana’s anxieties.

The primary part, by means of October, coated 14 constituencies within the Jind-Hisar-Bhiwani belt—Singh’s personal political territory, the place the household title nonetheless means one thing and the crowds had been reassuring. The second part pushed south, into Nangal Chaudhary and the districts of Mahendragarh and Rewari—what Singh referred to as the “actual check” of the yatra, constituencies the place the Congress footprint is lighter and the place a heat reception couldn’t be taken with no consideration. It was heat. “That was very encouraging,” Brijendra Singh stated, “for the yatris and for me personally.”

From there the Yatra moved by means of the Ambala and Yamuna Nagar districts, then Kurukshetra—the chief minister’s personal territory—and now Kaithal. Thirty-three constituencies stay. The beard will develop.

Throughout these 57 constituencies, some patterns have emerged so persistently that Singh can now recite them in sequence, like a person who has memorised a doc by strolling by means of it. Agrarian misery. Youth unemployment. Roads that collapse the second you exit a nationwide freeway. And, quieter, however working beneath the whole lot else, a fraying of the social cloth that the individuals themselves describe in fragments, in whispers, or generally within the open, in market lanes.

‘Congress ko bacha lo’

Singh is cautious about language when he talks about social divisions. He doesn’t attain for the phrase “communal” instantly. He says “strains”. He says “fissures”. He mentions the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots not as a political speaking level however as a cautionary story.

“In 13 years, these wounds haven’t healed,” he says. “They tried one thing related in Mewat in Haryana. Luckily, the Khaps, referred to as Friends in Southern Haryana, and Kisan unions went there and informed individuals: Don’t fall into this lure.”

The federal government, he says, “has nonetheless been attempting”. He mentions the language of 1 or two BJP MLAs as proof of intent, with out naming them. “Social division is the one agenda BJP has, as a result of from a governance viewpoint, they don’t have anything to supply the individuals of Haryana.”

That is the core pitch of the Sadbhav Yatra. That the BJP has been politically profitable in Haryana, three consecutive governments—exactly as a result of it has been socially disruptive. That the Congress wants not simply higher candidates or higher organisation, however a counter-narrative that may be walked into cities and villages and districts and made visceral.

What stunned Singh within the strolling, he stated, was not the anger—he anticipated the anger—however the craving. In Yamuna Nagar, in Ambala, strangers would come up and whisper: Congress ko bacha lo. “They weren’t Congress staff or political activists,” he stated.

“They had been shopkeepers. Individuals who had the great of the state and the nation at coronary heart. What they stated was coming from their hearts.” He paused. “Watching the nationwide media, one will get an image that individuals are solely speaking in Hindu-Muslim phrases. However individuals on the bottom actually yearn for good issues. Regulation and order. Much less crime. A way of mutual admiration amongst individuals of various faiths, communities, and castes. This I didn’t anticipate after I began my Yatra.”

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Jobs & migration

On unemployment, the problem that comes up in each constituency, rural or city, Jat heartland or Ahir belt, Singh doesn’t visitors in spherical numbers. He will get particular. An examination for assistant professor posts in pc science: 1,711 vacancies, 9 years to conduct the method, 39 individuals discovered eligible. One other for assistant professors in English: 513 posts, 151 chosen, greater than 100 of them from outdoors Haryana.

“The HPSC chairman goes on document to say that candidates failed as a result of the educational normal of state universities is declining,” Singh stated, his voice carrying the quiet outrage of a person who has held administrative accountability and is aware of what bureaucratic abdication seems to be like from the within. “You’re in energy for 12 years. You might have been appointing RSS individuals as vice-chancellors. You’re chargeable for the decline, if any. However you might be blaming the scholars.”

The opposite face of the unemployment disaster, the one he finds most viscerally distressing, is what he calls the “Dunki path”. Younger males from Haryana paying journey brokers Rs 40 lakh to Rs 50 lakh to be taken, by means of unlawful routes, to different nations seeking work. “I’ve come throughout lots of of villages the place I couldn’t discover younger individuals, as a result of all have moved to different nations,” Singh stated.

What’s new, he provides, is the geography. “Now even within the so-called interiors of the state, the place going overseas was by no means an choice, individuals are going overseas. The Punjab border areas have at all times seen migration. Now it’s all over the place.”

What has modified, what hasn’t

The governance failures of the BJP authorities Singh lists in a selected order. Roads first, as a result of they’re essentially the most instantly legible. “Nearly ten days again we had been in Ladwa, the chief minister’s personal constituency. Six days after that we had been in Gulha Cheeka. Each locations had been completely related. There have been nearly no roads.”

He stated it with a practised mildness, the rhetorical equal of a shrug. “The second you permit the expressways and large highways, you perceive what that vikas (growth) seems to be like.”

“It’s right here that I completely agree with BJP authorities’s declare that the get together doesn’t discriminate on the premise of areas or constituencies. Haryana Ek, Haryanvi Ek, as they are saying. If the roads of different elements of the state are in dangerous form so are the roads of Chief Minister Nayab Saini’s personal constituency, Ladwa. No discrimination in any respect,” he stated, and lets the sentence sit there a second earlier than shifting on.

Then regulation and order, significantly the surge in extortion and crime in Kurukshetra district, the place new trade has introduced cash and cash has introduced predators. “Kurukshetra was such a peaceable district of Haryana,” Singh says. “Apparently, within the final 12 months or so, essentially the most violent acts have occurred there, extortions, ransom.”

Then the agrarian sector, the place farmers in Hisar, Rewari, and a number of different districts are sitting in protest, some for a 12 months and a half, and “the federal government just isn’t even involved or bothered sufficient to name them out, even their very own MLAs”. This, he stated, is what earlier than the 2024 elections appeared like on the bottom, and it has not modified.

On the Bar: Brecht, and the place all of it leads

On the district courts, Singh was to deal with the Kaithal Bar Affiliation. Ranveer Prashar, a consultant of the Bar, had launched the session by noting that they invite leaders from all events however don’t do politics at such conferences. Singh listened, after which opened with Bertolt Brecht—the German playwright, poet, and Marxist provocateur who died in 1956 and whose phrases have apparently discovered a constituency on the roads of Haryana in 2026.

He learn from the poem on the political illiterate: the person who hears nothing, sees nothing, takes no half in political life, and doesn’t know that the price of flour, medication and hire all depend upon political choices. And Brecht’s warning about what that illiteracy breeds: the deserted little one, the robber and, worst of all, the corrupt politician.

“Politics is all over the place in life,” Singh tells the legal professionals. “One can’t keep away from it.”

From Haryana. he ranges to the nationwide, and from the nationwide to the worldwide — India’s international coverage posture, the warfare within the Center East, the Epstein information, India’s commerce relationship with the USA. He ended by studying out a tweet posted the day past by the US Treasury Secretary, allowing India to buy Russian oil for thirty days. “That is the place we have now reached now,” he says, and sits down.

Again on the street

These accompanying Singh on the Kaithal leg supply their very own testimonies.

Savita Choudhary, district president of the Mahila Congress from Palwal, says Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra had enthused individuals throughout the nation, and the Sadbhav Yatra is doing the identical for Haryana, making individuals really feel that the Congress remains to be current, nonetheless strolling. Lajwanti Dhillon from Uchana, the place Singh misplaced by 32 votes, says the yatra is sending a robust message throughout the state, of concord, but in addition of Congress continuity.

Om Prakash from village Balu in Kaithal, a person in his seventies, not given to political affiliation, has essentially the most concise abstract of what he thought the Yatra was about. “Brijendra Singh’s solely message,” he stated, “is that individuals can vote wherever they need. However they need to not enable those that are disrupting brotherhood to disturb them.”

Sandeep Lot, who contested the 2024 Lok Sabha election from Sirsa on an INLD ticket and joined the Congress earlier than the meeting polls, says: “When MLAs and MPs throughout the state are speaking about this yatra, it’s already an ideal success.”

Shakuntala from Hisar says she had walked with the yatra for the primary time on Friday. Her husband has been strolling since 5 October.

Again on the street between the Chhotu Ram Chowk and Hanuman Vatika, Singh had provided one unguarded remark in regards to the legacy query, about being the great-grandson of a person whose portrait hangs subsequent to Bhagat Singh’s at Singhu and Teekri borders of Haryana with Delhi, the place farmers sat on dharna for over a 12 months in 2020-2021, as a result of neither belongs to a celebration.

“Every particular person has his or her personal id and personal thought course of,” he stated. “You’re a product of your personal time. You suppose in another way and act in another way. Nonetheless, so far as the agrarian group is worried, it appears even ninety years after Sir Chhotu Ram, regardless of the Inexperienced Revolution, regardless of the progress and prosperity, the problems are nonetheless alive.” He paused. “Whether or not the answer lies in what Sir Chhotu Ram urged ninety years in the past, or whether or not one thing far more must be completed, that’s to be seen.”

Thirty-three constituencies to go. And the beard retains rising.

(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)

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