Aienla Imchem, a self-employed woman, and Amen Aiar, a woman church leader, were among the hundreds who braved the morning chill and assembled in the heart of Mokokchung town of Nagaland to see and hear Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday, the fourth day of his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra.

It was an orderly and enthusiastic gathering of residents who had started reaching the venue at 8am for the 10.30am meeting. There was also a significant presence of people from Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bengal, who had come years ago in search of livelihood and made the Ao-majority town their adopted home.

Like Aienla and Amen, they had also come to see and hear Rahul in a town which has a ruling Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP) MLA.

The NDPP has been heading the Nagaland government since 2018 in alliance with the BJP and the Opposition Congress has been without an MLA in the Assembly since then.

The Rahul-led Yatra has generated enough curiosity, something usually reserved for a celebrity or one’s own. Rahul has been trying to project himself as the latter during the Manipur and Nagaland leg of the Yatra, which enters Assam on Thursday.

Rahul did not disappoint if one were to go by the reaction of Aienla and Amen. They were there though the administration, according to the Congress, "ordered" the town shops to down their shutters for two hours from 10am to noon, which a Congress leader said "robbed the meeting of an even greater turnout".

The Congress MP seemed to have struck a chord with the gathering by flagging "our issues and concerns". Rahul spoke "some home truths affecting the people of Nagaland" in his 22-minute speech in English, including the translation in Ao "respecting" local sentiments.

“We are very happy with what he said. He spoke about our problems and aspirations. He spoke about unemployment. I opened a wholesale shop because there were no job opportunities. He also spoke about the bad road condition,” Aienla said.

Amen echoed Aienla by saying: “He touched upon the real issues of Nagaland such as bad roads and unemployment and about the elusive Naga accord, all pressing issues for the people of Nagaland.”

“He could speak about the roads because he travelled by road from Kohima. The road is as much an issue as anything else in Nagaland. To go to Delhi I need two days from Dimapur, which should have been a matter of one day,” Amen added.

“I worked in Vellore. The distance from Mokokchung to Kohima is almost the same as Vellore to Chennai (nearly three hours) but it takes double the time here. The roads have been under construction forever,” she said, grinning.

Both Amen and Aienla, who are strangers to each other, hoped Rahul flagging the road issue would draw the attention of the government and bring some positive developments.

By stressing road conditions and growing unemployment, the Congress was trying to connect with the youth as well as trying to expose the BJP’s claim of having a double-engine government for speedy development.

Rahul also flagged the road issue in a post directed at Modi: “Mr. Prime Minister,
Your tall claims of development demand firsthand experience. Have you braved the broken roads that Nagaland’s people navigate daily?”

He added: “One of the aims of Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra is to bring the country’s focus onto Manipur and Nagaland, to confront the neglect and forge a path towards inclusive progress.”

Rahul on Wednesday once again touched upon the non-implementation of the Framework Agreement signed in 2015 between the Narendra Modi government and the NSCN (I-M). Rahul said they were committed to finding a solution to the decades-old insurgency problem, a yearning for the Naga people.

Rahul, who visited the Nagaland Gandhi Ashram established in 1955 later in the day, ended his speech by assuring the crowd that they had in him “a soldier for Nagaland in Delhi” and that he would be “happy to raise any issue in Parliament” besides urging the young girls in the crowd to enter politics, drawing a huge cheer from the gathering.