Rahul Gandhi on Monday said the refrain among Jammu and Kashmir’s local populations was that “outsiders” were ruling them and running all their businesses, and pledged the Congress would fight to restore statehood and help correct the imbalance.

Rahul, accorded a rousing reception after his Bharat Jodo Yatra entered Jammu city, asked lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha to apologise for purportedly asking the agitating Kashmiri Pandits not to beg before the Congress leader.

Thousands of Pandit government employees have fled Kashmir following targeted militant attacks and sought relocation to Jammu but the administration has refused, continuing with its all-is-well line on Kashmir.

A delegation of Pandits told Rahul the BJP treated the community merely as a vote bank and was uninterested in solving its problems because the party wanted to keep the “Hindu Muslim issue (divide)” alive in the country.

To counter the Yatra, the BJP tweeted a video of a news conference by a leader of the Valmiki community, who were “outsiders” living in Jammu but were granted domicile rights after the August 2019 dilution of Article 370.

The irony was hard to miss: the BJP being forced to invoke “outsiders” to justify its 2019 decisions while Rahul was batting for local populations including the Dogras and the Pandits, seen as a core BJP constituency.

Rahul held a series of meetings with delegations of Dogras and Pandits, communities that had once fiercely defended the 2019 changes but are increasingly feeling hurt by the government’s policies to accommodate “outsiders”.

“The first thing they (local people) say is that ‘(while) Jammu and Kashmir was(earlier) run by people of Jammu and Kashmir, outsiders are today running Jammu and Kashmir and the administration pays no heed to our voices, our rights’,” Rahul told a gathering at Satwari in Jammu.

“(They say that) all trade is done by outsiders, the (permanent) residents of Jammu and Kashmir are only watching.”

Rahul said the Pandits had told him that lieutenant governor Sinha had asked them not to seek alms from the Congress leader.

“I was surprised (at what they said). Mr Lieutenant Governor, they are not begging but asking for their rights. The least you should do is apologise,” he said.

In a video, agitated members of the Pandit delegation are heard purportedly telling Rahul that the BJP has always used the community for vote bank politics.

“They don’t know how to solve the (Pandit) problem because it (the problem) keeps the Hindu-Muslim issue alive in the country,” a Pandit purportedly says.

Another Pandit appears to allege that the BJP starts discussing the Pandits only when elections approach. He said the BJP had not introduced any new scheme for the community, and that all such measures had been adopted by the Manmohan Singh government.

Jitendra Kachroo, who was part of the Pandit delegation, later said Rahul had patiently heard the delegation out.

“The BJP is using the Pandit community to further its political agenda. They do not mean to solve the problems of the Kashmiri Pandits because their political agenda is to spread hate on the basis of religion,” Kachroo told reporters.

“We (Muslims and Hindus) used to live together in Kashmir, sharing our culture, clothing and even surnames.’

The Yatra, which had started from Vijaypur in Jammu in the morning, encountered cheering crowds at several places despite tight security arrangements. Thousands joined the march at Satwari.

Rahul said the biggest issue for the local people was that of statehood, which the Centre had “snatched” in 2019.

“The Congress extends full support and will use all its energy for the restoration (of statehood),” he said.

The Congress said Jammu and Kashmir had the highest unemployment in the country and claimed that like elsewhere in India, all government policies were aimed at benefiting one or two businessmen at the cost of small and medium businesses.

Rahul said the introduction of the Agniveer scheme betrayed the BJP’s failure to understand the ethos of the army, and was detrimental to the forces as well as the job prospects of the youth.

The BJP lined up a series of programmes, including an “executive meeting” of politicians and activists addressed by senior leaders including Union minister Jitendra Singh, to counter the Yatra’s appeal.

It tweeted a Valmiki leader’s claim that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and not the Congress, should be credited with “Bharat jodo” (unite India) as communities like his were for the first time enjoying all the rights equally with the local people.