Amethi/Rae Bareli, India – Irfan*, a tea stall owner, is convinced that change is afoot.
“There hasn't been much traffic on this road from Rae Bareli to Amethi since the Congress lost power in 2014,” he says, referring to two cities and a party that for decades have been synonymous with a single family: the Nehru-Gandhis. or as they are more commonly known, the Gandhis.
The first family of Indian politics has ruled the country for almost half of its history since independence in 1947, with three generations of prime ministers: Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi and his grandson Rajiv Gandhi. And through ups and downs, when Congress has been in power and out of power, Amethi and Rae Bareli, separated by 62 kilometers (38 miles), have for the most part supported the family. They have served as safe constituencies for India's grand old party in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which is India's biggest electoral prize: with 80 seats of the country's total of 543 in the lower house of parliament.
In 2019, that tradition took a dramatic blow when Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, Rajiv's son, lost Amethi by 55,000 votes to Smriti Irani, a struggling minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. , who has been in power. at the national level since 2014. Rahul's mother and former Congress chief Sonia Gandhi retained Rae Bareli for the party, the only seat she won in Uttar Pradesh as the BJP swept across the country, winning 303 seats in total .
Now, five years later, the cities are a tense microcosm of the national battle between the BJP and the opposition Congress; between Modi and the Gandhis. Rahul will replace his 77-year-old mother from Rae Bareli this time. The BJP's Iranian seeks re-election from Amethi. Each of them is expected to face tough competition from the other's party. Amethi and Rae Bareli vote on May 20 in India's huge elections.
More than two seats are at stake: if the BJP wins Rae Bareli and retains Amethi, it will have effectively eliminated the Gandhi family and the Congress from Uttar Pradesh. On the contrary, opposition leaders say, a Congress victory in both seats could generate an anti-BJP push in a state that often decides who governs at the national level.
Irfan, from his vantage point in Tiloi town near Amethi and Rae Bareli, believes the political winds are blowing in the direction of the Congress. “There is a storm brewing in both cities, which will affect the entire state,” he says.
However, storms can be unpredictable, and Amethi and Rae Bareli know it.
Boost for the opposition?
In a video posted by the Congress Party on social platforms, Rahul and his mother Sonia are seen flipping through old photographs of the family visiting and disputing Amethi and Rae Bareli, while reflecting on their family's long-standing association with cities.
It's a bond that goes back decades. Feroze Gandhi, Indira's husband and Rahul's grandfather, won Rae Bareli in 1952, India's first independent election. Indira and Sonia later won this seat, their terms interspersed with terms in which their loyalists were nominated to contest from the city.
Only three times has the Congress lost Rae Bareli. In 1977, a national opposition coalition overthrew Indira's government and came to power amid a wave of anger against Congress for its imposition of a state of national emergency in 1975, when civil liberties and thousands of her opponents were suspended. politicians were arrested. In 1996 and 1998, when the BJP was rising nationally and came to power for the first time, it defeated the Congress here, although the Gandhi family was not in the fray on those occasions.
In Amethi, Indira's eldest son Feroze Gandhi lost the 1977 election but won in 1980. The Congress has only lost once since then, in 1998, before Irani's surprise in 2019. Sonia and Rahul won against Amethi .
After his defeat in 2019, many pundits had wondered if Rahul would contest again from the family's pocket constituencies, or even from Uttar Pradesh. He had won in Wayanad, in the southern state of Kerala, in 2019 and this time he competed again from there.
Congress Party insiders say that this time he was not convinced to contest for a second seat, but finally gave in to pressure from Sonia, who was against giving up the family strongholds without a fight. Rahul's sister Priyanka, who is now also a Congress leader, decided not to contest.
With Rahul competing against Rae Bareli, Kishori Lal Sharma, an old family friend, is competing against Irani from Amethi. It's a scenario that could work for the opposition, some of its leaders say. In the days before Congress decided its candidates for these seats, Ameeque Jamei, national spokesperson for the Samajwadi Party – the Congress's biggest ally in Uttar Pradesh – had told Al Jazeera that if Rahul or Priyanka contested, “the opposition would fight against the BJP will gain greater meaning.” He predicted that the Congress-led INDIA alliance challenging the BJP at the national level could win up to 20 of Uttar Pradesh's 80 seats.
Easier said than done. Rahul faces a formidable challenger: Dinesh Pratap Singh of the BJP, who gave Sonia a tough fight in 2019, substantially reducing her margin of victory. Singh has been relentless in his criticism of how the Gandhis treat his family. The party and family rarely mention Feroze Gandhi, Rahul's grandfather, whose grave is 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Rae Bareli.
“A person who cannot be his grandfather's, how can he be yours?” says Singh.
barbershop policy
On the ground, Rahul and Priyanka are laying waste to the otherwise sleepy towns of Rae Bareli and Amethi in their own way.
Recently, Rahul walked into a local barbershop to get his beard trimmed. The videos of him sitting in the barbershop went viral. Priyanka splits time between the two cities, doing roadshows and corner meetings.
The Congress has also brought in other heavyweight leaders to strengthen its campaigns here with their experience and political acumen. At Rae Bareli's Shalimar Guest House, Bhupesh Baghel, former chief minister of the central state of Chhattisgarh, is rallying his supporters. “Rahul has a lot of support in Rae Bareli. So I don’t have to do much,” he says.
Ashok Gehlot, former chief minister of Rajasthan, is managing the Congress campaign in Amethi against Smriti Irani, who has doubled down on her accusations that the Gandhi family neglected the city and Rae Bareli for decades despite winning there.
Congress has the support of two key voting blocs. Muslims constitute 22 percent of the population of Uttar Pradesh. A Muslim leader from Amethi, Muhammad Alam, said many members of his community might have considered voting for the BJP, but Modi's recent attacks – including suggestions that Congress would take Hindu wealth and give it to Muslims – had changed my mind.
Gautam Rane, a Dalit activist in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, says sections of the community, who are at the bottom of India's complex caste hierarchy, are also leaning towards Congress. The community has traditionally supported the regional Bahujan Samaj Party in the state. The Congress has used stray comments by some BJP leaders to suggest that the party wants to change the constitution and take away the benefits of caste-based affirmative action from Dalits, a charge the BJP has denied.
“This is Rahul Gandhi's election,” says Rane. “Nobody [else] matters.”
* Name changed to protect identity.
