Back to the Family Turf

IT IS LESS THAN 48 hours to go for the deadline to file nominations for the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh (UP). At a sweet shop, on the outskirts of town, as he awaits his morning customers, Santosh is hoping Congress will field party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra from the seat. What if it is her brother Rahul Gandhi? He smiles. A day later, in the midst of the afternoon rush at the shop, Santosh is too busy to indulge in a conversation on politics. By then Rahul Gandhi was all set to file his nomination from Rae Bareli. “Priyanka nahi to Rahul hi sahi (If not Priyanka, then let it be Rahul),” he again smiles and gets back to attending to a customer.

About an hour’s drive from state capital Lucknow, Rae Bareli is bustling with politi­cal activity, bringing traffic to a halt, with both Gandhi and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Dinesh Pratap Singh set to file nominations. Outside the Congress office, party workers wait for their candidate, holding placards with images of both Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi, as on the hoardings and nomination van. Till the night before, it was be­ing speculated that Priyanka would make her electoral debut from Rae Bareli, the Nehru-Gandhi pocket borough, from where former party president and her mother Sonia Gandhi had been a four-time MP. With Sonia moving to Rajya Sabha, there was uncertainty as to who Congress would field. Voters in the constituency were oblivious to the identities of the Congress and BJP candidates till 17 days before the polling date. The grapevine had thrown up various possibilities—that neither of the Gandhi siblings would contest from either Amethi or Rae Bareli, that Gandhi might again fight in Amethi and his sister in Rae Bareli, or that neither would contest in Amethi, the other family bastion which BJP’s Smriti Irani conquered in 2019.

On the scorching afternoon of May 3, the en­thusiasm of Congress workers, relieved that a Gandhi has been fielded from Rae Bareli, is palpable. Rahul Gandhi is expected any time to return from Amethi, his old seat, where he has gone with Con­gress’ new candidate Kishori Lal Sharma, a family loyalist, for filing his nomination. Amidst the Congress banners are some of Samajwadi Party’s (SP), which has entered into an alli­ance with Congress, offering 16 of the 80 seats to the party in UP. On a parallel road, Singh, a minister in the Yogi Adityanath government, who had given Sonia Gandhi a fight in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, holds a roadshow, a day after his candidature was announced.

“Sonia Gandhi brought AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences) here and Con­gress had set up several factories. But Rae Bareli has still not risen to the expectations of a high-profile constituency,” says Anoop Shukla, who runs a shop selling police material, near Congress’ district committee office where Priyanka’s image dominates all others.

Anand, who runs a paan (betel leaf) shop, is of the view that Congress might have risked losing the seat if it hadn’t fielded a Gandhi. “There was talk of Priyanka Gandhi contesting from here. That would have been even better. Anyway, this is their turf, so Rahul Gandhi has an edge.” For him, the Ram Mandir is a matter of faith but has nothing to do with elections.

With Amethi slipping out of its hands in 2019, Congress is leaving no stone unturned to hold on to Rae Bareli, its other bastion in UP, politically the most crucial state with 80 Lok Sabha seats, the highest in the country. While BJP is counting on the Narendra Modi govern­ment’s welfare schemes, the Ram Mandir and Hindutva, in Rae Bareli, Congress is relying on the past—decades of its emotional connect with the Nehru-Gandhi family, besides projects like AIIMS, a rail coach factory and the ring road that came about during Sonia Gandhi’s tenure in the constituency—to save itself from losing its last stronghold in the state.

Both AIIMS and the rail coach factory have been bones of contention between the two sides. In 2019, seven years after inaugurating the `2,500 crore rail coach factory, Sonia Gandhi, raising the issue in Lok Sabha, opposed its corporatisation, say­ing it was one of the most efficient PSUs. Congress had been demanding early completion of the AIIMS project, inaugurated when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was in power at the Centre, and has accused the BJP government of bringing down its capacity from 960 to 600 beds. In 2018, at a time when BJP had set the two Gandhi bastions as its tar­gets, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had reviewed the imple­mentation of the project. Two months ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while virtually inaugurating five AIIMS, includ­ing Rae Bareli’s, said he had kept his promise to the constituency.

Priyanka Gandhi, who had accompanied her mother when she laid the foundation stone for the state’s first AIIMS in 2013 and is spearheading the Congress campaign for her brother in Rae Bareli, has accused the BJP government of closing it down. Camping in the constituency, where her brother joins her around 10 days later, the Gandhis are reminding people of the association of four generations of their family with the con­stituency, right from the time of the 1921 Munshiganj massacre when Jawaharlal Nehru had stood by the farmers, underlining that it goes back 100 years. But the bigger challenge before the Gandhis is to convince people that they will stand by them in future, to counter BJP’s narrative that they will abandon the con­stituency. With Rahul Gandhi, an MP from Kerala’s Wayanad, having fought again from the safe southern seat five years after being defeated in Amethi, the question Congress is faced with is: If Rahul wins both Rae Bareli and Wayanad, which seat will he abandon?

IN A CONSTITUENCY held by the Gandhi family since Feroze Gandhi won it in 1952, Priyanka seems more popu­lar than her brother who is 15 years her senior in electoral politics. “People like Priyanka Gandhi a lot. She connects well with people. But Rahul Gandhi also stands a good chance,” says Gunjan Tiwari, who runs a tea stall at Basrama village.

According to Raj Kumar Singh, who has retired from the Army, if Priyanka had stood she would have swept the seat. “Rahul Gandhi’s image has been blemished by BJP. In the vil­lages and particularly among the old, there’s still a lot of support for the Gandhis, but there will be a fight,” he says.

Unlike in the past, the Gandhis can no longer take things for granted in the heart of the Hindi belt where Hindutva has resonance and BJP holds 62 of the 80 seats against Congress’ sole Rae Bareli. Rahul Gandhi’s defeat in Amethi broke the spell that the voters would remain loyal to the Gandhis even amidst political winds of change. In Rae Bareli, Sonia Gandhi’s vote margin had fallen to 1,67,178 in 2019, when Singh was BJP’s candidate, compared to 3,52,713 in 2014 when Ajay Agarwal, a lawyer-turned-politician, was fielded by BJP, and 3,72,165 in 2009 when Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) candidate RS Kushwaha, who has defected to SP, lost to her and BJP’s RB Singh came third with 25,444 votes. Congress also lost in Rae Bareli’s Assembly segments in the 2022 state elections. SP, which now holds four of the five Assembly segments—Bachhrawan, Harchandpur, Sareni, and Unchahar—of the Lok Sabha constituency, has not put up candidates against the Gandhis although there was no state-wide alliance with Congress in past Lok Sabha elections. The fifth Assembly segment, Rae Bareli, is with BJP. Mayawati’s BSP, which had entered into an alliance with SP in 2019, had also not put up a candidate in Rae Bareli that year. This time, Rahul Gandhi and SP chief and former Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav—who has entered the fray from Kannauj, his family bastion lost in 2019—are holding joint rallies.

After filing his nomination papers from Rae Bareli, flanked by Sonia Gandhi, party chief Mallikarjun Kharge and Priyanka, just hours before the deadline, Rahul Gandhi held a roadshow and posted on X (formerly Twitter): “It is with great confidence that my mother has given me the responsibility to serve the Karmabhoomi of our family.” But in neighbouring Amethi, where he was MP for three terms, Congress supporters are upset that he has given up on the seat. Brought into the Rae Bareli battlefield at the last minute, left with a fortnight to campaign for the May 20 election, Rahul has a daunting task before him.

“Sonia Gandhi had been MP here for 15 years. You see Etawah and compare with Rae Bareli. If an opposition MP is unable to do developmental work, then we should vote for BJP to ensure the double-engine government delivers,” says Ghan Shyam Awasthi, as he breaks ice to put into a glass of lassi for a cus­tomer at his shop along the highway. He was referring to the SP stronghold in which Mulayam Singh Yadav’s native village Safai, with its sprawling sports complex and modern structures, falls. However, BJP wrested the Etawah Lok Sabha seat in 2014 and held it again in 2019. Near his stall, Ashok, who is making tikkis (potato cutlets), says Rahul Gandhi is an outsider while Dinesh Pratap Singh belongs to Rae Bareli.

The political heat is rising in the constituency. At Dariba vil­lage, some farmers, all over 50, discussing politics sitting at a dhaba on the roadside, say there is no “Modi leher (Modi wave)” in Rae Bareli. But Tushar, a student, does not share the views of the die­hard Gandhi supporters. He praises the Ayushman Bharat card, a health insurance scheme for the poor, and says that though this is a Gandhi stronghold, the Ram Mandir and the fact that Singh is a minister in the state government will have an impact. Akhilesh, an educated youth supplying water at shops in Rae Bareli, complains of joblessness and asks why the Agnipath scheme, under which youngsters can be recruited into military service, is just lim­ited to four years.

Priyanka seems more popular than her brother in a constituency held by the Gandhi family since 1952. Congress is relying on that past—decades of its emotional connect with the Nehru-Gandhi family—to save itself from losing its last stronghold in the state

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In the Modi wave of 2014, Congress had managed to retain Rae Bareli and Amethi, but lost the latter in 2019 when BJP fielded actor-turned-politician Smriti Irani. With her star power, fiery oratory and frequent visits to Am­ethi, she has positioned herself as the antithesis to Rahul Gandhi whom she has been dubbing as “lapata (absconding)” MP. BJP’s Rae Bareli candidate, Singh, who had a more formidable opponent in Sonia Gandhi, is a grassroots poli­tician from UP. He began his political career in 2004 with SP when he contested the Vidhan Pari­shad election, and three years later, he contested as a BSP candidate from the Tiloi Assembly seat, which falls in the Amethi Lok Sabha constitu­ency, but was defeated. He later joined Congress, which he quit in 2018.

In its two pocket boroughs, Congress has been banking on Brahmin, Dalit and Muslim support. In Rae Bareli, Scheduled Castes (SCs) constitute 14.5 per cent of the town’s population as per Census 2011. With BJP reaching out to non-Jatav Dalits and non-Yadav Other Backward Classes (OBCs), caste equations have altered in the Hindi belt. How­ever, the tie-up with SP would ensure Congress the Yadav support. Interestingly, this time Mayawati has fielded a Yadav candidate, Thakur Prasad Yadav, from the seat.

Congress has won Rae Bareli in 18 of the 20 Lok Sabha elections held for the seat since Independence, with BJP and the Janata Party winning once each. Of the Congress victories, a member of the Gandhi family has won half the time. Despite being a Congress fortress, Indira Gandhi faced defeat in the seat when she was prime minister at the hands of her old rival, the Janata Party’s Raj Narain in the 1977 election after Emergency.

Journalist and writer Rashid Kidwai says, quoting a biog­raphy of Raj Narain, that while delivering his thanksgiving speech at Rai Bareli, he told the audience that they should not come to him for favours—as they could get someone like Indira Gandhi defeated, how could they value him? This indicated his distrust of the constituency’s electorate. Indira Gandhi, elected from Rae Bareli twice, again won in 1980, defeating Vijaya Raje Scindia, who was in the Janata Party then. But having tasted defeat in 1977, she had also fought from a southern seat—Medak in Andhra Pradesh—which she retained, resigning from Rae Bareli.

Another Gandhi is now in the fray from Rae Bareli. As he watches Singh’s roadshow in Rae Bareli sitting at his bookstore, Alok Pande says there will be a fight. “Both names were announced at the last minute. Let’s see what happens,” he says.

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Amita Shah