NEW DELHI - Former India central bank governor and renowned economist Raghuram Rajan walked alongside opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday during a cross-country march to revive the Congress party’s fortunes ahead of general elections due in 2024.

Mr Rajan, an ex-chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now a finance professor at Chicago Booth, is the highest-profile non-party member to have participated in the march, which will complete 100 days this week.

His appearance alongside Mr Gandhi as the march passed through the northwestern state of Rajasthan trended on Twitter in India, drawing admiration from Congress loyalists and scorn from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

As Mr Rajan and Mr Gandhi walked at the head of the march, flanked by a security detail, their followers waved India’s national flag.

The march - known as “Bharat Jodo Yatra” in Hindi, or the Connect India March - started from India’s south, and has been receiving a better-than-expected response from the public.

“Freedom is the essence of democracy and harmony is the foundation of a prosperous economy,” Mr Gandhi, who has grown a thick beard since the march started, wrote on Twitter, posting a picture of him walking with a smiling Mr Rajan. “We walk for unity and to secure India’s future.”

Mr Gandhi resigned as Congress president in 2019 after the BJP drubbed his party in the last election. The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has controlled the Congress party for decades but has also overseen its recent decline.

Mr Modi’s BJP said Mr Rajan’s appearance at the march was unsurprising as a Congress government had appointed him as the governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in 2013.

C.T. Ravi, a BJP national general secretary, said Mr Rajan took part to “repay his debt to the dynasty that had made him RBI governor”.

“He fancies himself as the next Manmohan Singh,” Amit Malviya, in-charge of the BJP’s national information and technology department, wrote on Twitter, referring to the former Congress prime minister and finance minister who was also an RBI governor.

Mr Rajan did not immediately respond to a request for comment. REUTERS