Will happily follow party’s instructions, says Harish Rawat

Days after the Congress central leadership, including All India Congress Committee general secretary K.C. Venugopal, asked him to stop his ‘Dhanyawad Evam Jansamvad Yatra’, former Uttarakhand Chief Minister and Congress veteran Harish Rawat said he would comply with the party’s directions on his ongoing political programmes.

Mr. Venugopal, who said he had spoken to Mr. Rawat amid concerns over his individual political programmes in the State, took to X to announce that he had made it clear to Mr. Rawat that the Congress’s election campaign in Uttarakhand would be conducted jointly with all its leaders.

This came days after Uttarakhand in-charge Kumari Selja, in a letter to Mr. Rawat on Thursday (October 1, 2026), asked him not to continue with the yatra, stressing the need for the party to present a united front.

After concluding his yatra on Tuesday, Mr. Rawat told The Hindu that he would bow to pressure from the Congress leadership over his ongoing yatras.

“If I am in the party, why would I not accept the party’s pressure?” he said.

Mr. Rawat insisted that his yatra was never a parallel programme, as alleged by the party leadership.

“No Congress programme was running when I took out the yatra,” he said, adding that he attended all programmes whenever he was asked to. He also claimed that several senior Congress leaders from Uttarakhand had attended his yatra.

He said the yatra was meant to thank those who had come to enquire after him during a serious illness that had kept him away from public life and politics for about three and a half months.

“I decided to go and meet my own people,” he said, adding that he had conveyed the same to the party’s central leadership.

Asked whether the pressure from the party had handed the BJP an opening to attack the Congress, Mr. Rawat said his two-day programme had disturbed the ruling party’s poll prospects.

“A momentum for change was building across the State through my yatra,” he said. “Now let them figure out how they will build that momentum,” he added.

Taking a further swipe at the BJP, he claimed that the Enforcement Directorate had been “let loose” on him as he had been summoned in a 10-year-old case just months before the elections.

“I am innocent which is why this yatra became necessary for me to take that challenge head-on,” he said.