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Medieval Dynasty – How to Fast Travel Easily

There is an unstuck button in the menu that will teleport your character to the starting spawn position at the beginning of the game.

If you have traveled south and your village is north like mine, or you just need to get to Gostovia quickly, use this button.

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He is the founder and editor of Magic Game World. He loved gaming from the moment he got a PlayStation 1 with Gran Turismo on his 7th birthday.

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Russia establishes special site to fabricate fuel for China’s CFR-600

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A special production site to fabricate fuel for China’s CFR-600 fast reactor under construction has been established at Russia’s Mashinostroitelny Zavod (MSZ - Machine-Building Plant) in Elektrostal (Moscow region), part of Rosatom’s TVEL Fuel Company. 

As part of the project, MSZ had upgraded existing facilities fo the production of fuel for fast reactors, TVEL said on 3 March. Unique equipment has been created and installed, and dummy CFR-600 fuel assemblies have already been manufactured for testing.

The new production site was set up to service an export contract between TVEL and the Chinese company CNLY (part of China National Nuclear Corporation - CNNC) for the supply of uranium fuel for CFR-600 reactors. Construction of the first CFR-600 unit started in Xiapu County, in China's Fujian province in late 2017 followed by the second unit in December 2020. The contract is for the start-up fuel load, as well as refuelling for the first seven years. The start of deliveries is scheduled for 2023.

“The Russian nuclear industry has a unique 40 years of experience in operating fast reactors, as well as in the production of fuel for such facilities,” said TVEL President Natalya Nikipelova. “The Fuel Division of Rosatom is fulfilling its obligations within the framework of Russian-Chinese cooperation in the development of fast reactor technologies. These are unique projects when foreign design fuel is produced in Russia. Since 2010, the first Chinese fast neutron reactor CEFR has been operating on fuel manufactured at the Machine-Building Plant, and for the supply of CFR-600 fuel, a team of specialists from MSZ and TVEL has successfully completed a complex high-tech project to modernise production,” she explained.

A special feature of the new section is its versatility: this equipment will be used to produce fuel intended for both the Chinese CFR-600 and CEFR reactors and the Russian BN-600 reactor of the Beloyarsk NPP. In the near future, the production of standard products for the BN-600 will begin.

The contract for the supply of fuel for the CFR-600 was signed in December 2018 as part of a governmental agreement between Russia and China on cooperation in the construction and operation of a demonstration fast neutron reactor in China. This is part of a wider comprehensive programme of cooperation in the nuclear energy sector over the coming decades. This includes serial construction of the latest Russian NPP power units with generation 3+ VVER-1200 reactors at two sites in China (Tianwan and Xudabao NPPs). A package of intergovernmental documents and framework contracts for these projects was signed in 2018 during a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

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Claudia Looi

Touring the Top 10 Moscow Metro Stations

By Claudia Looi 2 Comments

Komsomolskaya metro station looks like a museum. It has vaulted ceilings and baroque decor.

Hidden underground, in the heart of Moscow, are historical and architectural treasures of Russia. These are Soviet-era creations – the metro stations of Moscow.

Our guide Maria introduced these elaborate metro stations as “the palaces for the people.” Built between 1937 and 1955, each station holds its own history and stories. Stalin had the idea of building beautiful underground spaces that the masses could enjoy. They would look like museums, art centers, concert halls, palaces and churches. Each would have a different theme. None would be alike.

The two-hour private tour was with a former Intourist tour guide named Maria. Maria lived in Moscow all her life and through the communist era of 60s to 90s. She has been a tour guide for more than 30 years. Being in her 60s, she moved rather quickly for her age. We traveled and crammed with Maria and other Muscovites on the metro to visit 10 different metro stations.

Arrow showing the direction of metro line 1 and 2

Moscow subways are very clean

To Maria, every street, metro and building told a story. I couldn’t keep up with her stories. I don’t remember most of what she said because I was just thrilled being in Moscow.   Added to that, she spilled out so many Russian words and names, which to one who can’t read Cyrillic, sounded so foreign and could be easily forgotten.

The metro tour was the first part of our all day tour of Moscow with Maria. Here are the stations we visited:

1. Komsomolskaya Metro Station  is the most beautiful of them all. Painted yellow and decorated with chandeliers, gold leaves and semi precious stones, the station looks like a stately museum. And possibly decorated like a palace. I saw Komsomolskaya first, before the rest of the stations upon arrival in Moscow by train from St. Petersburg.

2. Revolution Square Metro Station (Ploshchad Revolyutsii) has marble arches and 72 bronze sculptures designed by Alexey Dushkin. The marble arches are flanked by the bronze sculptures. If you look closely you will see passersby touching the bronze dog's nose. Legend has it that good luck comes to those who touch the dog's nose.

Touch the dog's nose for good luck. At the Revolution Square station

Revolution Square Metro Station

3. Arbatskaya Metro Station served as a shelter during the Soviet-era. It is one of the largest and the deepest metro stations in Moscow.

Arbatskaya Metro Station

4. Biblioteka Imeni Lenina Metro Station was built in 1935 and named after the Russian State Library. It is located near the library and has a big mosaic portrait of Lenin and yellow ceramic tiles on the track walls.

Lenin's portrait at the Biblioteka Imeni Lenina Metro Station

5. Kievskaya Metro Station was one of the first to be completed in Moscow. Named after the capital city of Ukraine by Kiev-born, Nikita Khruschev, Stalin's successor.

Kievskaya Metro Station

6. Novoslobodskaya Metro Station  was built in 1952. It has 32 stained glass murals with brass borders.

Novoslobodskaya metro station

7. Kurskaya Metro Station was one of the first few to be built in Moscow in 1938. It has ceiling panels and artwork showing Soviet leadership, Soviet lifestyle and political power. It has a dome with patriotic slogans decorated with red stars representing the Soviet's World War II Hall of Fame. Kurskaya Metro Station is a must-visit station in Moscow.

Ceiling panel and artworks at Kurskaya Metro Station

8. Mayakovskaya Metro Station built in 1938. It was named after Russian poet Vladmir Mayakovsky. This is one of the most beautiful metro stations in the world with 34 mosaics painted by Alexander Deyneka.

Mayakovskaya station

One of the over 30 ceiling mosaics in Mayakovskaya metro station

9. Belorusskaya Metro Station is named after the people of Belarus. In the picture below, there are statues of 3 members of the Partisan Resistance in Belarus during World War II. The statues were sculpted by Sergei Orlov, S. Rabinovich and I. Slonim.

10. Teatralnaya Metro Station (Theatre Metro Station) is located near the Bolshoi Theatre.

Teatralnaya Metro Station decorated with porcelain figures .

Taking the metro's escalator at the end of the tour with Maria the tour guide.

Have you visited the Moscow Metro? Leave your comment below.

January 15, 2017 at 8:17 am

An excellent read! Thanks for much for sharing the Russian metro system with us. We're heading to Moscow in April and exploring the metro stations were on our list and after reading your post, I'm even more excited to go visit them. Thanks again 🙂

December 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm

Hi, do you remember which tour company you contacted for this tour?

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The trains and stations of the Moscow Metro

2 Comments · Posted by Alex Smirnov in Cities , Travel , Video

The Moscow Metro is the third most intensive subway system in the world after Tokyo and Seoul subways. The first line was opened on May 15, 1935. Since 1955, the metro has the name of V.I. Lenin.

The system consists of 12 lines with a total length of 305.7 km. Forty four stations are recognized cultural heritage. The largest passenger traffic is in rush hours from 8:00 to 9:00 and from 18:00 to 19:00.

Cellular communication is available on most of the stations of the Moscow Metro. In March 2012, a free Wi-Fi appeared in the Circle Line train. The Moscow Metro is open to passengers from 5:20 to 01:00. The average interval between trains is 2.5 minutes.

The fare is paid by using contactless tickets and contactless smart cards, the passes to the stations are controlled by automatic turnstiles. Ticket offices and ticket vending machines can be found in station vestibules.

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Tomás · August 27, 2012 at 11:34 pm

The Moscow metro stations are the best That I know, cars do not.

Alberto Calvo · September 25, 2016 at 8:57 pm

Great videos! Moscow Metro is just spectacular. I actually visited Moscow myself quite recently and wrote a post about my top 7 stations, please check it out and let me know what you think! :)

http://www.arwtravels.com/blog/moscow-metro-top-7-stations-you-cant-miss

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Time Is Running Out for Rahul Gandhi’s Vision for India

But in this year’s elections, the scion of India’s most storied political family is still trying to unseat Modi — and change the nation’s course.

India’s National Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi, as his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra (Unite India March for Justice) passed through Varanasi. Credit... Chinky Shukla for The New York Times

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By Samanth Subramanian

Samanth Subramanian is a writer and journalist based in London. He has covered Indian politics, culture and the rise of Hindu nationalism for The New Yorker, The Guardian and The New York Times.

• April 20, 2024

Rahul Gandhi stood in a red Jeep, amid a churning crowd in Varanasi, trying to unseat the Indian government with a microphone in his hand. “The mic isn’t good,” he said. “Please quiet down and listen.” It was the morning of Feb. 17 — Day 35 of a journey that began in the hills of Manipur, in India’s northeast, and would end by the ocean in Mumbai, in mid-March. In total, Gandhi would cover 15 states and 4,100 miles, traveling across a country that once voted for his party, the Indian National Congress, almost by reflex. No longer, though. For a decade, the Congress Party has been so deep in the political wilderness, occupying fewer than a tenth of the seats in Parliament, that even its well-wishers wonder if Gandhi is merely the custodian of its end.

Listen to this article, read by Vikas Adam

Gandhi called his expedition the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra — roughly, the Unite India March for Justice. He never said it in so many words, but the yatra was an appeal to voters to deny Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party a third straight term in parliamentary elections starting on April 19. Congress, the only other party with a national presence, is the fulcrum of an anti-B.J.P. coalition. Indian pundits and journalists bicker about many things, but on this point they’re unanimous: Only a miracle will halt the B.J.P. Still, it falls to Gandhi, steward of his enfeebled party, to try.

The speech lasted barely 15 minutes. Gandhi is a fidgety orator, unable to shrug off the routine disturbances of a rally. He kept calling for silence, and scolding overzealous policemen regulating the mob. He didn’t ramble, exactly, but eddied around the point he wanted to make. “This is a country of love, not of hate,” he said. He talked of two Indias, populated respectively by the millionaires and the impoverished. He laid into TV news channels, many of which have been captured by oligarchs prospering under the B.J.P.: “They won’t show the farmers, or the workers or the poor,” he said. “But they will show Narendra Modi 24 hours a day.” Then he helped onto his Jeep a member of the audience, a young man who complained that, despite spending hundreds of thousands of rupees on his education, he still had no job. His is a common story in Modi’s India. Two out of every five recent college graduates are out of work, and young people make up 83 percent of the unemployed. To his crowd, Gandhi called out: “These are the two issues facing India: unemployment and — ?” He received only a tepid response of “poverty.” When he finished, there was no applause.

The crush of people at the rally was suffocating, although in India a crowd is no index of popularity. People may gawk and then go vote for the other guy — and Gandhi is, after all, one of the country’s most recognizable men. Officially, he is no longer his party’s president, but he is undoubtedly its face. At 53, with a well-salted beard and serious eyes, he’s too old to be called Congress’s “scion,” but he still wears the sheen of dynasty. His great-grandfather, the unflinchingly secular Jawaharlal Nehru, was India’s first prime minister. His grandmother, Indira, and his father, Rajiv, both became prime ministers; both were assassinated. His mother, Sonia, steered Congress into government in 2004 and 2009, but declined the top post. Then, on the heels of several corruption scandals, the mighty party — 140 years old next year — came unstuck. Out of 543 seats in the lower house of Parliament, Congress holds just 46, compared to the B.J.P.’s 288. Gandhi embodies all this history: the triumphs as well as the failures. For the crowds, that is the fascination he exerts.

One of Modi’s successes has been not just to trounce the Congress Party but also to persuade people that the party has weakened India and emasculated its Hindus. Through his cult of personality, Modi is fulfilling a century-old project, recasting India as a Hindu nation, in which minorities, particularly Muslims, live at the sufferance of the majority. Emblematic of this is a new law offering fast-tracked citizenship to people fleeing Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan — as long as they aren’t Muslim. It is the B.J.P.’s totemic achievement: the use of religion to decide who can be called “Indian.” Opposing this law or indeed resisting the B.J.P. in any way has proved difficult. Investigating agencies mount flimsy cases against critics of the government, as Amnesty International has frequently noted. (Amnesty itself halted its work in India in 2020, in the midst of what it later called an “incessant witch hunt” by the government.) Activists are regularly imprisoned, sometimes on the basis of planted evidence; journalists are sent to jail or otherwise bullied so frequently that India has slipped to 161st out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index , just three spots above Russia. Pliant courts often endorse it all. Such is the mood in India that one of the plainest sentences in Congress’s election manifesto is also one of its most resonant: “We promise you freedom from fear.”

As the election neared, the quelling of dissent grew more visible still. This year, in an unprecedented move, Modi’s administration arrested two chief ministers of states run by small opposition parties. (One stepped down hours before his arrest.) In both instances, the government claimed corruption, but many critics noted that the arrests were uncannily timed to pull two popular politicians out of campaign season in states where the B.J.P. has struggled. Income-tax authorities froze Congress’s bank accounts, supposedly over a late filing. “It has been orchestrated to cripple us in the elections,” Gandhi told reporters. If so, it feels like overkill, because it is common wisdom that Congress can’t win. Those who want nothing to do with the B.J.P. watch Gandhi with conflicted anguish. He is, by all accounts, sincere, empathetic and committed to a pluralistic India. This is a man who forgave his father’s killers, and who said on the sidelines of a private New York event last year, according to one of those present: “I don’t hate Modi. The day I hate, I will leave politics.” But he’s also the latest in a lineage under whom Congress grew undemocratic and sometimes wildly corrupt. The great liberal hope is that Gandhi can achieve contradictory things: use his dynastic privilege to resuscitate his party, and dissolve the dynasty at the same time.

That’s a steep demand, but Gandhi’s priorities are altogether more Himalayan. “He doesn’t say it,” Sitaram Yechury, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) who knows Gandhi well, told me, “but he’s modeling himself after Mahatma Gandhi. He doesn’t want to take any position of power.” In January, Gandhi told his colleagues that he has “one foot in and one foot out of the party,” and that he plans to be “a bridge to activists outside.” As he explained it then, the B.J.P., with its undiluted majoritarianism, “is a political-ideological machine. It can’t be defeated by a political machine alone.” His role, as he sees it, is to be the counter ideology — to go out into the country, rouse Indians to the dangers of the B.J.P. and offer them his dream of a fairer, more tolerant India instead.

The yatra is a well-worn exercise in Indian politics. Its most famous practitioner, Mahatma Gandhi, returned from South Africa in 1915 hungering to know more about his country. Go travel the land, one of his mentors told him, “with eyes and ears open, but mouth shut.” After using the yatra to gain an education, he employed it for political purpose. In 1930, he walked 240 miles to the Arabian Sea to protest the British monopoly on salt; hundreds of people joined him, and he spoke to thousands en route. On reaching the beach, he scooped out a fist of salty sand and announced he had broken the monopoly, setting off a wave of civil disobedience. There have been plenty of other yatras since. In 1983, Smita Gupta, a retired journalist who was then a cub reporter, walked part of a 2,650-mile yatra by a politician named Chandra Shekhar, as he tried to enlist support against Indira Gandhi. As Gupta recalled, for people who live far from the centers of power, “when a politician descends from the skies and comes to your home, it’s a big deal — I was swept away.”

Rahul Gandhi conceived of his yatra much as Chandra Shekhar did: as a way to counter the ideology of a seemingly immovable leader. There’s no place more vital for this project than Uttar Pradesh, the state through which I trailed him in February. With its 80 parliamentary seats and 240 million people, many living on incomes lower than the sub-Saharan average of $1,700 a year, Uttar Pradesh is electorally pivotal. Excelling here isn’t a guarantee of securing power in Delhi, but it’s as close to ironclad as it gets. It’s also the state that produced the Gandhis. When Nehru, born in Uttar Pradesh, ran for Parliament from a constituency near his hometown, Congress shared one advantage with other parties in post-colonial countries: the glory of having led the freedom struggle. That kept for surprisingly long without spoiling. Nehru’s heirs — Indira, then her son Rajiv, then his wife, Sonia — all won election after election from their constituencies in Uttar Pradesh. Rahul Gandhi once called Uttar Pradesh his karmabhoomi , a Sanskrit word for the land of one’s momentous actions.

But Uttar Pradesh also became the land where Congress was fated to fail. Today it’s the roiling heart of the B.J.P.’s Hindu nationalism. Varanasi, Hinduism’s most sacred city, lies near the state’s eastern border, and Modi chose to represent it in Parliament — a crafty choice for a man wishing to be hailed as a defender of his faith. Around 40 million Muslims live in the state, and under its B.J.P. chief minister, they’re increasingly being erased from public life. One law jeopardizes their right to marry whom they wish. Other regulations have constricted the meat trade, in which many Muslims work. Islamic schools are in danger of being banned outright. By painting Muslims as trespassers, the B.J.P. licenses violence against them, sometimes even explicitly. (In 2015, a man was beaten to death by his Hindu neighbors in his village in western Uttar Pradesh, on the rumor that he had slaughtered a cow. The men accused of his murder have since been freed on bail and the case is still unresolved.) More than any other part of India, Uttar Pradesh shows what the B.J.P. has wrought and how successful it has been. In 2019, during the last national election, the B.J.P. swept 62 of the state’s 80 seats. Congress won just one.

A few years ago, Gandhi decided that his party needed a way to mobilize people against the B.J.P., settling on a yatra as a means to that end. He embarked on his first, walking up the spine of India, in late 2022. Even the plainness of his attire — sneakers, loosefitting trousers, white polo shirt — was a rebuke to the Olympian vanity of Modi, who once had his own name stitched, in tiny letters, to form the pinstripes of a suit. The yatras felt like campaigns, yet Gandhi’s team insists that they were not about projecting him as prime minister but rather a form of ideological resistance, almost above politics. (His staff politely refused my repeated requests for an interview.)

The Congress Party found itself divided over Gandhi’s approach. Salman Khurshid, a Congress veteran, worried that the party has strayed from bread-and-butter political strategy. We were in his office in Delhi, and he kept looking dolorously at his phone, which never stopped ringing. It was the feverish middle of the election season, and Congress was picking its candidates and negotiating alliances with other parties. Gandhi had to weigh in, Khurshid said: “We’d like him to be within shouting distance. He’s a thousand kilometers away.” Khurshid wished for a more customary system, the sort that promised, say, a 20-minute appointment at 10 a.m. to talk about three things. “That’s how ordinary political parties work,” he said. “He wants an extraordinary political party.”

Sometimes, Gandhi’s team told Khurshid and others to come on the yatra and talk to Gandhi on the bus. But it wasn’t sufficient, Khurshid told me. “There’s never enough time.” The yatra involved a lot of stopping and starting and stopping again, as I discovered. Two or three times a day, Gandhi’s Jeep — and its caravan of police cars, S.U.V.s and a vehicle bearing a device labeled “Jammer” — inched through a town, halting at a crossroads for a speech. Then the convoy would hasten to its next engagement, trying to cover vast Uttar Pradesh distances through dense Uttar Pradesh traffic, and always behind schedule. The day ended in a cordoned-off campsite, where everyone slept in shipping containers fitted with bunks. Here, in his own enclosure, Gandhi hobnobbed with local Congress functionaries or practiced jiu-jitsu with his instructor.

In Prayagraj, where we headed after Varanasi, it’s possible to traverse the distance between the party’s zenith and its rock bottom in a single evening. First, Gandhi made a speech outside Anand Bhavan, an ancestral family home, an eggshell-white mansion on an emerald lawn. Anand Bhavan is now a museum, but its chief relic is intangible: the promise of Nehruvian secularism, circa 1947. Then, while leaving Prayagraj, we passed the high court that invalidated Indira Gandhi’s election in 1975 on the grounds of electoral malpractice. The verdict provoked her to impose a state of emergency — a suspension of civic rights — for nearly two years, tarnishing Congress and strengthening its competitors. By this time too, the party had wrapped itself feudally around the dynasty. Any emergent leaders with their own base were subdued or cast off because they threatened the Gandhis. By the late 1980s, other politicians had clawed voters away from Congress by courting specific groups — members of a caste, say, or as with the B.J.P. and Hindus, of a religion.

As Congress faltered, its workers joined rival parties, including the B.J.P. In India, party workers don’t just canvass voters — they step in for an insufficient state. If a farmer needing a loan is turned away by the bank manager, or if a woman can’t pay the cost of treatment for her sick daughter, party workers use their contacts to help. These services are performed in the hope that the favors will be returned every five years, come the election. “The average party worker needs, say, 10,000 rupees a month to run his home,” an old Congress hand in Varanasi, who asked not to be named for fear of professional reprisal, told me. “If their party can’t get to power, how will they get paid? They’ll go work for whoever is most likely to win.”

Gilles Verniers, a political scientist, recounted taking his Ashoka University class on a trip to Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh’s capital, on the day votes were counted in a state election in 2017. He distributed his pupils among the headquarters of various parties, but by midmorning, the students at the Congress office called him. “They said: ‘Can we go elsewhere?’” Verniers told me. “ ‘There’s no one here, everybody left.’ The party knew they were getting spanked, but at least you could stick around, thanking workers, encouraging them. There was no one to even make tea.” Today, the Varanasi representative told me, “we just hope to God we win even one seat in Uttar Pradesh.”

Gandhi entered politics with several lifetimes’ worth of trauma packed into his 33 years. When he was 14, two of his grandmother’s bodyguards shot her dead — revenge for an assault she ordered upon a Sikh temple to root out separatist militants sheltering within. The bodyguards had taught a young Rahul how to play badminton. Seven years later, while he was a student at Harvard, his father, Rajiv, was killed by a suicide bomber — revenge again, this time by a separatist group in Sri Lanka, where he had sent Indian troops to aid the government. It became difficult for Rahul Gandhi to be Rahul Gandhi: to trust people or go anywhere ungirded by security. For a while it didn’t seem inevitable that he would choose politics. Later he would say that he made the decision on a train just as it entered Prayagraj, when he was taking his father’s cremated remains to pour into the Ganges River.

Smita Gupta, the former journalist, attended one of Gandhi’s earliest rallies, in an Uttar Pradesh town called Farrukhabad, in 2004. The road was so crowded that a 15-minute drive took three hours. Gandhi arrived in a Jeep, smiling and dimpling and waving. As he walked to the dais, the barricades broke from the masses of excited people pushing against them. “He was swept away, sailing with the crowd,” Gupta said. Soon after Congress won that election, Gandhi took charge of the party’s junior wing. The transition to the dynasty’s next generation seemed underway, and he exhibited the air of someone who knew he was the man for the job.

At the time, Gandhi often showed little patience with the orthodox figures of politics. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political scientist at Princeton, who met Gandhi back then, recalled that he made minimal eye contact and seemed distracted — unable even to feign interest as politicians usually do so well. A journalist who met Gandhi privately told me that he was, as the saying goes, eager to tell you what you thought: “It was: ‘You don’t know how the Congress works. Let me tell you.’ Or, ‘I’ll tell you about India and Pakistan.’” In his memoir “A Promised Land,” Barack Obama compared Gandhi, whom he met in 2010, to “a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject.” One of Gandhi’s colleagues admits he used to be “very anxious and pushy” back in the day. “He has calmed down over a period of time.”

He had to. Congress isn’t a party you can change in a hurry. Its ways are too ossified, and it is honeycombed with fiefs. When Gandhi wanted Congress to field new faces in elections, he pushed for candidates to be selected through an internal voting system, rather like a primary. According to one former party consultant, senior politicians, worried about losing their tickets, complained to his mother, Sonia, the Congress president. Khurshid, one of the old guard, told me: “Everything that destroys democracy got in there — money, muscle, power.” It resulted in “the dedicated warriors of the Congress at the youth level” being sidelined. The primaries never took off. In 2018, Gandhi wanted young chief ministers in three states where Congress had won state elections. He didn’t get his way. But at least Gandhi tried something, a consultant to Congress told me. “If you leave it to these other guys,” he said, “they will not even change the curtains in the party office.”

These exasperations may have amplified a hesitancy about power and responsibility that Gandhi seemed always to harbor. In 2009, he declined the offer to be a cabinet minister. Perhaps even then he saw his role as that of a moral authority outside the government, Yechury said. On becoming the party’s vice president, Gandhi gave not a stirring speech but a somber one, recalling the assassinations in his family and counseling his party that “power is poison.” In 2017, he became the party’s president, but after Congress lost the 2019 election, he quit the post. According to two Congress sources, he expected other top party leaders to feel accountable and step down as well. No one did.

In a party often pilloried for being dynastic, Gandhi has been unable to stamp his will on Congress. One friend of the family described Gandhi as “timid.” When his 2022 yatra went through the state of Kerala, Yechury, the Communist leader, considered walking with him, but members of Congress’s Kerala unit protested: The Communists were their chief rivals in the state, and this show of solidarity — even against the B.J.P., a common antagonist — wouldn’t do at all. Yechury couldn’t understand it. Gandhi might not be the party’s president, but there’s no doubt he is its presiding force, Yechury said. Why didn’t he just hold fast?

Two years ago, during a protest in Delhi, Gandhi and dozens of his Congress colleagues were detained by the police. One of those present, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told me that several senior leaders were held together, and Gandhi had “really frank and open conversations” with them. A couple of these leaders “got aggressive, saying, ‘You have to take charge,’ persuading him to take back the party presidency, accusing him of running away from responsibility.” It was high-octane drama: “What do you do when you’re detained, man? We were there for six hours. He couldn’t go anywhere.” The Congress worker remembers Gandhi saying then: “I know what I have to do. My job is to do mass outreach. You guys handle the party.”

Gandhi’s two yatras have unfolded in the shadow of another, some 30 years ago — one that ultimately helped bring Modi to power. Riding in a Toyota decked out as a chariot, a B.J.P. leader named Lal Krishna Advani rode through northern and central India, advertising one of his party’s priorities: the claim that, 450 years earlier in the town Ayodhya, a Mughal ruler had knocked down a temple to build a mosque. Advani promised his audiences that the B.J.P. would restore the temple to that very spot. Two years later, the foot soldiers of the B.J.P. and other right-wing groups razed the mosque, triggering not just riots that killed 2,000 people but also a deep fracture in Indian society. After that, the B.J.P. regularly listed the construction of a temple in its election manifestos, harvesting votes out of the religious polarization around the issue. In 2019, mere months after Modi won his second term, the Supreme Court ruled that the mosque’s demolition was illegal, and that there was no evidence it had been built by knocking down a Hindu shrine. Yet the judges allowed a new temple to be erected on the site, legitimizing the majority’s abuse of disputed medieval history to its own retributive ends. In January, that temple was consecrated. Modi presided over the rites, as if he were head priest rather than prime minister.

Congress didn’t send any representatives to the temple’s inauguration, and I had expected Gandhi to speak about Ayodhya, which lies, after all, in Uttar Pradesh. But he barely mentioned it, even in Varanasi, a city facing a potential reprise of Ayodhya. The morning after his speech there, I visited a quarter called Pilikothi, following a sequence of lanes, each framed by so many tall tenements that there was something canyonlike about them. It was a Sunday, but Pilikothi echoed with the tack-tack of sari looms. The sound drifted into the basement in which Abdul Batin Nomani, the mufti of Varanasi, sat at a low desk. Behind him were shelves of theological volumes. When he pulled a book out to illustrate a point, his hand didn’t hesitate for a second.

The title of mufti, or jurist, has been in Nomani’s family since 1927, and he has filled the role for more than two decades. In that time, he said, the B.J.P. has spread so much hate that it has corroded even the possibility of amicable relations between Hindus and Muslims. You can be arrested for offering the namaz in public, or for being a Muslim man marrying a Hindu woman, or for running your butcher shop during Hindu festivals. You could be lynched on a whisper that you’re carrying beef, or have your house bulldozed on suspicion of being a rioter, or be hunted by mobs goaded by B.J.P. politicians calling for murder. Nomani told me about the head of a Hindu monastery nearby, and how they would invite one another to their religious functions. “Then, slowly, his mind turned,” Nomani said. “He must have been convinced that to talk to people like me is wrong.”

Nomani heads the committee of the Gyanvapi Mosque, another centuries-old structure that the Hindu right aims to replace with a temple. Weeks before I met Nomani, a court allowed Hindus to worship in the mosque’s basement, similar to what happened in Ayodhya in 1986. Varanasi’s Muslims are fearful, Nomani said. Wouldn’t the same cascade of consequences ensue? Wouldn’t other mosques surely follow? When the yatra swung by, Nomani told a local Congress representative he would welcome a meeting with Gandhi. It never transpired. Nomani wondered why Gandhi didn’t even speak about the issue and directly confront the B.J.P.’s divisive politics. “Someone could have called and reassured us: ‘Don’t worry, we’re with you,’” Nomani said. He regards Gandhi with sympathy. “I believe he wants to do the right thing, and that he is against this culture of hate,” he said. “But he’s weak. His party is weak. He can’t do anything.”

From Prayagraj, the yatra headed to Amethi, a town a couple of hours to the north. I had last visited in 2009, when it was still a stronghold of Congress’s first family, and I remembered the fields of winter mustard, yellow till the horizon, on the town’s outskirts and the wishbone layout of its three main roads. Gandhi won resoundingly that year. But in 2014, when his margin shrank, he must have seen the incoming tide of Hindu nationalism. Sanjay Singh, a local Congress worker, recalled that, on vote-counting day, Gandhi sounded dispirited as the results trickled in, telling his colleagues “the politics of this state is beyond my understanding.” In 2019, the B.J.P. flipped Amethi. If Gandhi hadn’t simultaneously run from another seat, in Kerala, he wouldn’t be in Parliament at all.

The yatra’s schedule included an evening rally, so I spent the afternoon in Singh’s house in a village nearby. A stern-eyed man with a ramrod bearing, he wore a spotless white shirt and trousers, and he had tucked a Congress streamer around his neck like a cravat. He lamented Congress’s loss of Amethi, but he wasn’t surprised. Between 2014 and 2019, Gandhi visited Amethi less and less, dispatching his advisers instead. Still, Singh felt almost guilty that Amethi voted for the B.J.P. Last year he had a chance to meet Gandhi, he said, and asked him to run from Amethi again: “I told him, ‘Whatever mistake we made, we’re ready to rectify.’” A few weeks after I met Singh, though, Gandhi declared that he would stick to his constituency in Kerala.

For the rally, the party had set up rows of chairs in a field, but the audience started dribbling out almost as soon as it began. By the time Gandhi was midway through his speech, only half the chairs were occupied. He talked about China, and riots in faraway Manipur, and the B.J.P.’s cronyism. Standing next to me, a policewoman told a videographer, “He isn’t talking about Amethi at all.” The only cheers came when he raised the plight of India’s poorer castes — the very people who made up most of his audience. As he had done throughout the yatra, he warned them they’d never get very far in the B.J.P.’s India. He may well be right, but I remembered something Mehta told me. Modi’s narrative of a resurgent Hinduism, however hollow, makes people feel good about themselves, Mehta said. “Rahul’s narrative does the opposite.”

The next day, something interrupted the yatra’s staid choreography. We were in Raebareli, the one Uttar Pradesh constituency still with the Congress Party. Halfway through his address, Gandhi invited a young man onto his Jeep to quiz him about his prospects. The man introduced himself as Amit Maurya, but he was barely audible, so Gandhi said, paternally but lightly, “First, learn how to handle a microphone.”

“I’m a little anxious, sir.”

“Don’t worry,” Gandhi replied. “You’re a lion.”

Either it was the pressure of the moment or the unchecking of a dam of frustration, but Maurya burst into tears.

In the week’s most genuine moment, Gandhi seemed nonplused, as if he didn’t know what to do with this political gift. Instinctively, he folded Maurya into an embrace and kept his arm around the sobbing man. Still, he just couldn’t abandon his routine — the statistics he’d memorized, the thesis presentation mode he was in. But even if his speech didn’t change, he sounded more passionate — angry, even — about the inequities he had lined up to narrate to his crowd.

Well after the yatra’s end, when summer hammers down and ballot machines appear in schools and colleges and municipal buildings, Gandhi may at least be able to count on Maurya’s vote. But who knows. Elections are subject to every manner of caprice, and the B.J.P. has shown itself to be peerless at swaying India’s voters. Out of hubris or audacity, Gandhi wants to persuade people to consider lofty things like morality and love, indispensable values that nonetheless make for nebulous campaign platforms. He doesn’t mind if it takes years, and perhaps he doesn’t mind if he loses his party in the process. In that time, though, he risks seeing his idea of India extinguished altogether.

Samanth Subramanian, who has written frequently for the magazine, is the author of several books, including “This Divided Island: Life, Death and the Sri Lankan War” and “A Dominant Character: The Radical Politics and Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane,” a New York Times Notable Book of 2020. Chinky Shukla is a documentary photographer based in New Delhi. Her work focuses on cultural assimilation, memory and the environment.

Read by Vikas Adam

Narration produced by Tanya Pérez

Engineered by Zachary Mouton

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