The Congress is back with its yatra in Assam.

The Assam PCC announced its much-awaited Jonai-to-Sonai Yatra from October 20, hours after Tuesday’s “shocking” Haryana Assembly election results to ensure the party rank and file do not get “demotivated and distracted” from its preparations for the 2026 Assembly poll.

The yatra will be on the lines of the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, a mix of walking and travelling by bus, to connect with the masses as well as party rank and in one constituency a day to “assess” the reasons for the party not improving upon its 2019 Lok Sabha tally of three seats in the general election held in April-May this year despite “positive” ground reports so that it could take “corrective measures” to unseat the BJP-led ruling coalition in the 2026 Assembly poll.

The Assam Yatra was announced by the Assam PCC on June 7, three days after the Lok Sabha election was announced where the Opposition party won three of the 14 seats and came very close in one seat.

The 42-day yatra, covering a distance of about 700km, will start from Jonai in eastern Assam on October 20 and conclude in Sonai in southern Assam on December 15 with breaks of 14 days, mostly two days’ rest, in between.

The state PCC on Tuesday night suddenly released the detailed constituency-wise schedule while its rank and file was trying to come to terms with the ruling BJP scoring a hat-trick in Haryana by winning 48 of the 90 Assembly seats while the Congress finished second with 37 seats in an election where popular perception and exit polls had written off the ruling BJP.

Prodded, the Congress insiders admitted that they thought it prudent to announce the yatra date immediately after the “disappointing” Haryana poll results.

“There is no denying Haryana was a huge disappointment for us. We were expecting a resounding win but we have to accept the people’s mandate. The state leadership, factoring everything, decided to announce the date immediately so that our party workers and supporters would get busy and not think too much about Haryana and lose focus of the battles ahead. We did not want our workers and leaders to get distracted and disheartened,” a PCC general secretary told The Telegraph.

PCC president Bhupen Kumar Borah could not be contacted but he had said in June that the yatra’s objective was to assess their Lok Sabha performance and
take corrective measures so that they are ready to take on the well-entrenched BJP, which has already got into poll mode by taking steps to implement a slew of of pro-people schemes.

Congress insiders said that the state unit will have to go beyond the yatra if it wants to mount a strong challenge pointing to the Lok Sabha outcome where the state unit was ahead in only 34 of the 126 Assembly seats in Assam.

“The issues which need fixing is sorting out internal differences, a cause of debacle in Haryana, selecting strong candidates, readying enough booth level members to do duty in polling stations as well as counting centres. We should be able to test our strength in the upcoming assembly bypoll and panchayat poll this year before the big one in 2026,” one of them said.