Jammu: Actor-politician Urmila Matondkar on Tuesday joined the Congress’s Bharat Jodo Yatra in Jammu and Kashmir. Rahul Gandhi is leading the foot march, which is now in its last phase. “When stars join, the journey becomes brighter,” the grand old party tweeted in Hindi. Ever since the party’s march started in September, many prominent faces – outside of the Congress – have been a part of the grand old party’s foot march. Actors, including Pooja Bhatt, former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, veteran army officers have walked alongside Rahul Gandhi. In Delhi, Kamal Haasan joined the foot march last month.
In the cold winter morning in Nagrota, Matondkar walked to robust bellows of “Jodo, Jodo, Bharat Jodo” as the party’s outreach march looked to enter its last leg in Kashmir on 27 January.
The yatra on Tuesday moved from Nagrota to Udhampur before it will stride up to the Valley later this week.
Matondkar had quit the Congress in September, 2019, after a brief six-month stint, and had said at that time: “My political and social sensibilities refuse to allow vested interests in the party to use me as a means to fight petty in-house politics instead of working on a bigger goal in Mumbai Congress.”
Matondkar had also blamed the Mumbai leadership for ignoring her grouse with her 2019 campaign coordinators whom she had called “politically immature” and said they could not mobilise ground workers in her favour.
The actor represented the Congress in the Mumbai North constituency in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. She lost by a huge margin of over 4.6 lakh votes to sitting BJP MP Gopal Shetty.
Matondkar joined the Shiv Sena in December, 2020.
