Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Mar 6: The former Congress president Rahul Gandhi and his sister and the party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra are all set to contest the Lok Sabha elections from Uttar Pradesh where the party has reached an electoral understanding with the Samajwadi Party.
A senior Congress leader from UP on Wednesday confirmed that Rahul Gandhi would again contest from Amethi, a seat represented by his father Rajiv Gandhi. Rahul had been elected from Amethi from 2002 to 2019. In the last elections, he faced shock defeat from the BJP’s Smriti Irani who later became a union minister.
His candidature from Amethi is expected to be announced soon. The BJP has already announced Ms Irani’s candidature from Amethi and she has also thrown a challenge to Mr Gandhi to contest against her from the seat that was traditionally a Congress bastion till she managed to break it in the last elections.
The party sources said Mr Gandhi was also likely to contest from his present constituency Wayanad in Kerala from where he was elected in 2019 and continued to remain MP despite losing in Amethi.
In 2019, Ms Irani beat Rahul Gandhi by 55,000-odd votes for one of the biggest upsets of the election. Throwing a challenge, Ms Irani said last week, “In 2019 he left Amethi. Today Amethi has left him. If he is confident then, without going to Wayanad… let him fight from Amethi,” she said, as Mr Gandhi’s ‘Bharat Jodo Nyaya Yatra’ entered the constituency. “Empty roads tell us what people feel about Rahul Gandhi,” Ms Irani said.
With another former Congress president Sonia Gandhi having already shifted to the Rajya Sabha, the Raebareli constituency vacated by her is almost certain to go to her daughter Priyanka Gandhi to make her electoral debut. Earlier the seat was won thrice by her grandmother and former prime minister Indira Gandhi while Sonia Gandhi was elected from Raebareli five times. In the 2019 elections, it was the only seat the Congress had won in UP.
There has always been a ‘will she, won’t she’ air about Ms Gandhi Vadra and elections. Before 2019 she set tongues wagging after quipping “why not,” when asked if she would contest from Varanasi – Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bastion, but finally the party had opted out of fielding her against Mr Modi.
Ahead of this election there was similar speculation. Mrs Gandhi’s Lok Sabha-to-Rajya Sabha shift – she has been elected from Rajasthan – was supposed to signal a shift in party leadership before the general election. As she did so, she made an emotional appeal to Raebareli’s voters, which has been won by a member of the Gandhi family in all but three general elections since independence.
After the Congress confirmed Sonia Gandhi’s withdrawal from Raebareli, there was speculation Priyanka Gandhi Vadra – whose resemblance to Indira Gandhi had not gone unnoticed in the constituency – would finally contest an election.
There were even posters in Raebareli this week urging the Congress to name Ms Gandhi Vadra as its candidate for the prestigious seat. “Take Congress’ development work forward, Raebareli is calling… Priyanka Gandhiji, please come,” the posters read. The Congress has now responded to that call.
The BJP has not yet announced its Raebareli candidate; in 2019 the party fielded Dinesh Pratap Singh, who slumped to defeat by over 1.8 lakh votes in the constituency.
In the 2014 and the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the Congress managed to win Rae Bareli despite a wave in favour of the BJP. Therefore, there is immense interest surrounding the BJP’s pick for this seat and whether Sonia Gandhi vacating the seat will impact the Congress’s prospects.
