: In the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha constituency, Congress president Sonia Gandhi is unassailable. Voters cutting across communities say the seat is hers as long as she contests it.
“We defeated Indira ji [former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi] once — that was a mistake we won’t make again,” says Umakant Chowdhury, a Kurmi, recalling the historic post-Emergency elections of 1977.
But that Gandhi magic does not extend to the Assembly constituencies in Rae Bareli. The party currently does not hold even one of the five seats. Nor does it extend to the neighbouring Amethi, where Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi is MP. In 2012, the party won only the Jagdishpur and Tiloi seats, but lost the other three seats in the constituency.
Today, in an electoral alliance with the ruling Samajwadi Party, the Congress is trying to regain lost ground by demanding all 10 seats in the two Gandhi pocket boroughs, apparently in exchange for not fielding candidates in the districts of Mainpuri, Etah, Etawah, Kannauj — the traditional Yadav bastion — and Azamgarh, which SP leader Mulayam Singh represents in the Lok Sabha.
SP strong here
But since the SP holds seven seats in Rae Bareli and Amethi, the party’s leadership is finding it hard to convince its cadres to renounce their claims. Inside the Congress, with victory in sight, claimants for the party ticket have swelled, even as sitting SP MLAs have announced they will stand as Independents or on other party symbols.
In Bachrawan, for instance, over 20 aspirants are seeking the Congress ticket, even as the party’s leadership is considering an “outsider”, Sushil Pasi, a recent entrant from the Bahujan Samaj Swabhiman Sangharsh Samiti of R.K. Chaudhury. The sitting SP MLA, Ram Lal Akela, a Shivpal Yadav associate, is contesting as an Independent.
A local Congress worker, Ankur Shukla, explains the logic: “Sushil Pasi got 30,000 votes as an Independent last time. No one in the Congress has that much ‘face value’. So he is being preferred.”
But in the messy and complicated politics of U.P., at the Pasi-dominated village of Babhuriakheda, Ram Naresh Pasi, an avowed Bahujan Samaj Party supporter, trying his luck on the Peace Party ticket, says, “The Congress should give the ticket to a local Congressman — then he would win in the name of Sonia Gandhi. An outsider is a mistake here.”
In the Harchandpur Assembly constituency, there are two main aspirants for the Congress ticket: Sudha Dwivedi, for whom fellow Brahmins are rooting, and Rakesh Singh, brother of the powerful Dinesh Pratap Singh, the Congress’s sole MLC in the Legislative Council.
If the Brahmins of Purepanditkapurwa claim that only Ms. Dwivedi can win the seat, the Thakurs of Tenghana village are playing their cards close to their chest — they have two Thakur options: Rakesh Singh, and the BSP candidate Manish Singh, also from a powerful family, and one political option, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party whose politics they favour these days.
“We will see who is winning closer to the date of polling and we will go with that candidate,” Dev Narain Singh says.
But if the Congress presence in the alliance is making the upper castes and some sections of the most backward castes and Dalits reconsider their options, two communities blindly voting for the SP-led combine are the Yadavs and Muslims.
In the village of Gojhawa in the Bachrawan constituency, the Yadavs, after bitterly complaining about the pockmarked stretch that leads to their village, and notebandi , turn to the current election.
“We are all with the Congress, whoever the candidate is,” Ramesh Yadav says.
“There was no development here because this is a Congress area, but if the Congress joins the government, this place might improve.”
In the 2012 Assembly polls, he says, the village voted for the SP; in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it voted for Sonia Gandhi.
SP-Congress ahead?
And in the busy shopping area of Rae Bareli Sadar, Mirza Ayub Beg, who runs a store selling paint, says Muslims will largely vote for the Congress’ Aditi Singh, rather than the BSP’s Shahbaz Khan. Those words are repeated by cloth merchant Imran.
While both say it is partly because Ms. Singh’s father, Akhilesh Pratap Singh, a local ‘Robin Hood’, who held the seat earlier, worked for everybody, they both mention that they would like to see Akhilesh Yadav as the next Chief Minister.
The signs are propitious for the alliance but only if the two parties can end the squabbling over seats and candidates. The people are willing to do their part.
