Ajay Rai vs Modi in Varanasi: Congress 4th list shows lack of zest to fight

The Congress, late Saturday (March 23), declared its fourth list of candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

Though the list includes nominees for nine of the 17 constituencies that the Congress will contest as an ally of Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP) in Uttar Pradesh, the party leadership has, for reasons unexplained, kept on the suspense over whether or not it would field Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra from their family’s traditional seats of Amethi and Rae Bareli, respectively.

Mix of candidates

The 46 names announced by the party are a mix of sitting MPs, a handful of senior leaders and several candidates who lost successive Lok Sabha and assembly elections but continue to be patronised by the Congress high command.

In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency of Varanasi, the Congress has yet again fielded Ajay Rai, showing no appetite to pose any fight to the BJP’s foremost mascot, and a lack of imagination in terms of the narrative that the party wishes to build from a state that sends 80 members to Parliament’s Lower House.

The Congress, sources said, had insisted on getting Varanasi as part of the seat-sharing deal with the SP on the grounds that it would only be proper for a national party to field a candidate opposite the Prime Minister. While the Congress may have achieved this with the candidature of Rai, the current chief of the Congress’s UP unit, there is little else that it has conveyed by fielding the Bhumihar leader who started off as a BJP member before joining the Congress in 2012, following a stint with the SP.

No match for Modi

Rai has contested the Lok Sabha polls from Varanasi thrice since 2009 (on an SP ticket) and lost each time; his last two defeats being against Modi. Though a former five-term MLA, Rai has also lost the last three assembly polls he contested from Varanasi’s Pindra assembly segment, which was once considered his stronghold.

A senior Congress leader from UP told The Federal that while “no one expects any candidate to win against Modi from Benaras, we could have at least sent some message from the kind of candidate we chose against the PM".

"In 2019, we built up hype over the possibility of Priyanka Gandhi being fielded against Modi and then decided to nominate Rai instead and it is clear we haven’t learnt any lesson this time either…If nothing else, we could have at least chosen some backward caste face or even tried to convince Mahantji (VN Mishra, head priest of Varanasi’s famous Sankat Mochan temple), who is hugely respected in Benaras, and is a bitter critic of Modi and has always been vocal about how the syncretism of Kashi is being destroyed by the BJP," the leader added.

Uninspiring candidates

Rai, of course, isn’t the only uninspiring candidate to feature in Saturday’s list and certainly not the only one from UP.

Another candidate who has repeatedly contested and lost polls is Tanuj Punia, son of senior party leader PL Punia and the party’s nominee from Barabanki. While the senior Punia had won the Barabanki seat in 2009, when the Congress had performed registered its best performance in the state in over two decades by winning 22 of 80 seats, Tanuj stood a distant third here in the 2019 electoral contest and also in the 2022 assembly poll and 2019 assembly by-poll he contested as a Congress nominee from the Zaidpur assembly segment.

Similarly, in UP’s Bansgaon constituency adjoining Yogi Adityanath’s stronghold of Gorakhpur, the Congress has fielded Sadal Prasad, who had quit Mayawati’s BSP earlier this month. Prasad had unsuccessfully contested the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls from Bansgaon, having lost the latter one to the BJP’s Kamlesh Paswan by a margin of over 1.5 lakh despite being the joint candidate of the then SP-BSP alliance.

Seats for returnees

As expected, the Congress has given tickets to Imran Masood and Danish Ali from Saharanpur and Amroha, respectively. Masood, who does have some clout in Saharanpur, returned to the Congress a few months ago after resigning from the SP and the BSP in quick succession over just a year. Ali, the sitting MP from Amroha, was expelled from the BSP last November and had joined the Congress earlier this week. The party’s other candidates in UP are its former MP Pradeep Jain Aditya from Jhansi, senior leader Akhilesh Pratap Singh from Deoria, Ram Nath Sikarwar from Fatehpur Sikri and Alok Mishra from Kanpur.

In the adjoining state of Uttarakhand, the Congress failed to convince its former chief minister Harish Rawat to enter the poll fray from Haridwar and ultimately settled for his son, Virender Rawat. From the Nainital-Udhamsingh Nagar seat, the Congress has fielded AICC secretary Prakash Joshi.

As reported by The Federal on Friday, the Congress has managed to expand its allies in the INDIA bloc as far as Rajasthan is concerned. While the Congress had left the state’s Sikar constituency for ally CPM earlier, on Friday, it earned another partner in influential Jat leader Hanuman Beniwal’s Rashtriya Loktantrik Party. The Nagaur constituency, which Beniwal had won in 2019, has been left by the Congress for the RLP.

Recent embarrassment

The addition of Beniwal’s RLP to the Opposition alliance in Rajasthan came on a day when the Grand Old Party’s central leadership was left red-faced after reports surfaced that Sunil Sharma, whom the Congress has fielded from Jaipur, had been associated with an organisation – Jaipur Dialogues – whose social media platforms routinely dished out vicious anti-Muslim messages and posts mocking members of the Nehru-Gandhi family, particularly Rahul Gandhi.

A number of public intellectuals slammed the Congress leadership on X and other social media platforms and wondered how Rahul, who had promised to open a ‘shop of love in a marketplace of hate’ (nafrat ke bazaar mei mohabbat ki dukaan), could condone the candidature of Sharma.

While the Congress refused any comments, Sharma released a statement on Saturday evening asserting he was “not associated in any way” with the social media platforms of Jaipur Dialogues and that though he served as Director of the controversial organisation of the same name, he had “distanced myself from it for quite some time”.

Controversial name

The Congress’s worries over its candidate selection are, however, unlikely to end with Sharma’s statement.

The party has also stirred a fresh controversy with its fourth list by fielding Chaudhary Lal Singh from the Udhampur constituency in Jammu & Kashmir. Singh, who returned to the Congress on Monday, had during his time as a BJP MLA in 2018 led protests against the arrest of Hindu men who were accused of raping and murdering an eight-year-old girl in Jammu’s Kathua.

Singh’s return to the Congress, sources said, had already riled the party’s J&K allies, National Conference and People’s Democratic Party as well as civil rights’ activists who, until recently had been lauding Rahul Gandhi’s “shop of love” message.

Lal Singh’s candidature from Udhampur is now likely to kick up a fresh furore that the Congress can ill-afford in an election that is already challenging and also attract the charge of hypocrisy each time the party criticises Modi for his silence on crimes against women in Manipur and the allegations of sexual harassment against his colleagues such as Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh.

Seniors take the plunge

The Congress could, however, take some respite from the fact that it got a handful of party veterans to enter the poll fray at a time when most senior leaders were either shying away from contesting the upcoming elections or batting for tickets to their kin.

While for the Jammu seat, the party has fielded senior party leader Raman Bhalla, in Madhya Pradesh, as reported by The Federal earlier, the party prevailed upon former chief minister Digvijaya Singh to contest the elections from his erstwhile constituency of Rajgarh while former Union minister and the party’s tribal face in the state, Kantilal Bhuria will, once again, enter the poll fray from Ratlam.

The other candidates from MP that were declared on Saturday, however, are likely to stir fresh intra-party trouble for the Congress which has already been facing a major exodus of leaders in the state.

In the Bhopal, Indore, Jabalpur, Ujjain and Mandsour constituencies, the Congress has fielded Arun Shrivastav, Akshay Bam, Dinesh Yadav, Mahesh Parmar and Dilip Singh Gurjar, respectively; all candidates with little or no electoral heft.

Murmurs of discontent

“We have thrown away the election in these seats, which to begin with were difficult to win...some of the people who have been given tickets cannot even gather 100 party workers for a dharna, how does the high command expect them to fight the BJP? You can expect more disgruntled leaders to quit the party in the coming days,” a former Congress MLA from the state who was lobbying for a ticket from one of these seats told The Federal, adding that he too was now “considering options”.

In Tamil Nadu, where the Congress will again fight the polls as a junior partner of MK Stalin’s DMK, the party has chosen to play safe by repeating most of its incumbent MPs. As such, while Karti Chidambaram, Manickam Tagore, Vijaykumar Vasanth and Jothimani have been given tickets again from the Sivaganga, Viridhunagar, Kanyakumari and Karur constituencies, respectively, Arani MP MK Vishnu Prasad has been shifted to Cuddalore this time.

In Saturday’s list, the Congress has dropped just two of its sitting MPs – both from Tamil Nadu. Krishnagiri MP A Chellakumar has been replaced with K Gopinath while Tiruvallur MP K Jeyakumar has made way for former IAS officer Sasikanth Senthil, who had joined the Congress five years back and had become a key backroom manager of the party, most recently tasked with managing the party’s war room during last year’s Rajasthan assembly polls. The party has also fielded its incumbent Andaman MP Kuldeep Rai Sharma once again.

Maharashtra seats

In Maharashtra, the Congress still appears to be struggling to decide who it should field from the Chandrapur constituency – the lone seat in the state that it had won in 2019. As reported earlier, while the Congress high command favours giving the Chandrapur ticket to incumbent MLA Pratibha Dhanorkar, widow of former MP Suresh Dhanorkar who had won the seat five years earlier, party veteran and Leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra assembly Vijay Wadettiwar has been lobbying for the seat for his daughter.

The candidates that the party declared for Maharashtra on Saturday were Rashmi Barve from Ramtek, Vikas Thakare from Nagpur Namdev Kirsan from Gadhchiroli and Prashant Padole from Bhandara-Gondiya, a seat from which the party high command wanted to field its state unit chief and former MP Nana Patole but couldn’t do so due to his categorical refusal to fight the polls.