Hours before the deadline for filing nominations, the Congress announced on Friday morning that it would field its former president Rahul Gandhi from Uttar Pradesh’s Rae Bareli constituency, and Gandhi family loyalist K.L. Sharma from Amethi, ending the long suspense over who would contest from the family’s stronghold.
Though this brings Mr. Gandhi back into the battle for the Hindi heartland, it evoked a wide range of responses, from Congress leaders terming it a masterstroke, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP leaders accusing him of “running away”.
Mr. Gandhi — accompanied by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, his mother Sonia Gandhi, sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, brother-in-law Robert Vadra, and party general secretary K.C. Venugopal — filed his nomination for the seat, describing it as an “emotional” moment. His mother Ms. Gandhi had held the seat till February, when she resigned after winning a Rajya Sabha election from Rajasthan.
Opting for the ‘safer bet’
By moving to Rae Bareli, Mr. Gandhi has avoided a re-match with Union Minister and BJP leader Smriti Irani in Amethi. After winning the seat thrice in a row since his electoral debut from Amethi in 2004, he lost to Ms. Irani in the 2019 general election. Rae Bareli, which the Congress has lost only thrice in the past, is considered a safer bet.
Countering the criticism this move has generated, Mr. Gandhi claimed that the Amethi and Rae Bareli seats are not “different” and voters in both the constituencies are his “family”.
“I am happy that Kishori Lal ji, who has been serving the area for 40 years, will represent the party from Amethi. In the ongoing fight for justice against injustice, I seek the love and blessings of my loved ones. I am confident that all of you stand with me in this fight to save the Constitution and democracy,” he wrote on X, after filing the nomination.
‘Gandhis accepted Amethi defeat’
Rae Bareli was the only seat that the Congress had won in Uttar Pradesh in the 2019 election, with Sonia Gandhi decimating the BJP’s Dinesh Pratap Singh by roughly 1,67,000 votes. Ms. Gandhi polled 5,34,918 votes (55.80 percent) against the BJP nominee who polled 3,67,740 (38.36 percent) votes. Mr. Singh, who had been with the Congress for more than seven-years before switching to the BJP, is once again in the fray and will face Mr. Gandhi.
In Amethi, meanwhile, the contest is now between Ms. Irani and Mr. Sharma. Ms. Irani said that the Gandhi family has accepted its defeat in Amethi even before the first vote had been cast. “Had they felt there was any chance of victory on the seat, they would have contested from here and not fielded their proxy,” the BJP leader said.
Congress communications chief Jairam Ramesh, however, described the decision as a part of a “larger strategy.” “This single decision has befuddled the BJP, its supporters, and its sycophants,” he said in a post on X. A common Congress worker, he said, will break the arrogance of the BJP in Amethi. The entire country is a “stronghold” of the Gandhi family, not just the two seats in Uttar Pradesh, he said, also asking the Prime Minister why he could not even “muster the courage to contest an election from a single seat below the Vindhyas?”
‘Unfair to Wayanad voters’
Mr. Sharma, the party’s Amethi nominee, has been associated with the seat since 1983, when he started working with Rajiv Gandhi. He is said to have played a crucial role in then-Congress president Ms. Gandhi’s victory from Amethi in 1999. When in 2004, she shifted to Rae Bareli, vacating the seat for her son, Mr. Sharma began managing both the constituencies. The blame was also heaped at his door, in 2019, when Mr. Gandhi lost the seat to Ms. Irani by a margin of over 50,000 votes.
The Left parties also joined in to criticise Mr. Gandhi for fighting from Rae Bareli, given that he is already in the fray from Wayanad in Kerala. Communist Party of India leader Anne Raja, who stood against Mr. Gandhi in Wayanad, called the move a moral failure. She argued that while the rules allow candidates to fight two seats, Mr. Gandhi should have been honest with Wayanad voters. “The decision may have been announced today, but clearly the Congress had been mulling over it for sometime. By hiding that decision till the polling ended in Wayanad, Mr. Gandhi has done injustice to Wayanad voters,” she said.
