Why Rae Bareli’s electoral battle may be a cakewalk for Gandhi scion

In Unchahar town of the assembly segment by the same name in the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha constituency, a group of men, most of them in their 30s, is walking out of a corner meeting that has just been addressed by BJP candidate Dinesh Pratap Singh. “Jai Shri Ram”, they proclaim in unison, all of them donning saffron stoles of the BJP.

“Who will you vote for,” this reporter asked the group, expecting the obvious reply, more so, since Singh, with his retinue of local BJP office- bearers and security personnel, was still at the venue. The full-throated reply that came from the group was, arguably, the clearest indicator of the election result expected in Rae Bareli.

“Usi ko denge jo Rae Bareli ki pehchaan hai”, the group said as one of the men sheepishly said, “Rahul Gandhi”. Abhilash Kaushal, an office-bearer with the Unchahar BJP unit, who was standing nearby burst out laughing. “What can I say... they have made up their mind,” he said.

Congress stronghold

On May 2, defying the general expectation of fielding him from the adjoining Amethi constituency that he had lost to the BJP’s Smriti Irani in 2019, the Congress had declared Rahul as its candidate from Rae Bareli. A day later, with his mother and incumbent Rae Bareli MP Sonia Gandhi, his sister Priyanka Gandhi and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge in tow, Rahul filed his nomination from Rae Bareli before leaving to campaign for his party elsewhere across the country. Rahul hasn’t returned to Rae Bareli since and his campaign is being managed by Priyanka, who is also the show-runner for Congress nominee and close family aide KL Sharma in Amethi.

Yet, Rahul’s absence or the fact that Sonia, who has now opted out of electoral politics to become a Rajya Sabha MP from Rajasthan, rarely visited the constituency since her fifth triumph from the seat in 2019, seems to make little adverse impact on his victory prospects. On the other hand, Singh, who has been aggressively flagging Rahul’s absence variously as an “insult to Rae Bareli” and a sign of “conceding defeat even before polling”, has been struggling to draw support, including from his own party’s rank and file.

“It is a one-sided contest. The only subject of suspense is what Rahul’s victory margin would be. As things stand today, we think he will cross Sonia Gandhi’s 2019 victory margin (of 1.67 lakh votes) against Dinesh Singh,” says advocate and social worker Farman Naqvi, a resident of Mustafabad in Unchahar. “Gandhi parivar aur Rae Bareli ka dil ka rishta hai... Rae Bareli is known because of the Gandhi family and though there are people who are unhappy about Sonia Gandhi never visiting the constituency in the last five years, no one can deny that whatever infrastructure Rae Bareli has today, from the NTPC plant to the railway coach factory, is all because of the Gandhis. Rahul is contesting from here for the first time and he will definitely win,” says Ramesh Kumar, a resident of Rae Bareli’s Lalganj town.

Vote of confidence

This vote of confidence over Rahul’s expected victory is at odds with the hot takes several political observers offered when the Congress first declared its Rae Bareli candidate. The notion that Rahul could face a tough contest in this family stronghold that has previously elected his mother, grandmother Indira Gandhi and grandfather Feroze Gandhi and great grandaunt Sheila Kaul for multiple Lok Sabha terms primarily drew strength from Sonia’s depleting victory margins in the constituency over the past two general elections.

Also, while the Congress had been faring poorly across the five assembly segments – Rae Bareli, Unchahar, Bachhrawan, Sareni and Harchandpur – that constitute the Lok Sabha seat, the BJP had been on an uptick here; first by poaching Rae Bareli MLA Aditi Singh from the Congress ahead of the 2022 assembly polls and then with the defection of Samajwadi Party’s Unchahar MLA Manoj Pandey to the saffron ranks earlier this year.

Sonia’s victory margin from Rae Bareli had fallen from 3.72 lakhs in 2009 to 3.52 lakhs in 2014 and then sharply to 1.67 lakhs in 2019. Sonia’s last election from the constituency was also the first time that she faced Dinesh Singh at the hustings, leading many to claim following Rahul’s candidature from the seat that the current contest could be even closer than the one five years ago.

Umesh Tiwari, a social worker in Rae Bareli’s Bachhrawan assembly segment, however, dismisses the 2019 poll outcome as an “aberration”, asserting that Sonia’s victory margin dropped by half due to a combination of two factors. “Firstly, there was an even stronger pro-BJP wave than the one in 2014 because of the Balakot airstrikes and secondly, Dinesh Pratap Singh was a fresh face, who at the time had the backing of Thakurs, Banias, Pasis and Koris, which are major caste groups in the constituency... the other substantial vote bank of Brahmins, which traditionally went to Sonia, had also split. This time though, the scenario is very different. There is no wave in favour of Modi and BJP, and Dinesh Singh, because of his arrogant behaviour with the people, has lost support of almost everyone, including his own Thakur community. The BJP has given a walkover to Rahul by fielding Dinesh Singh,” Tiwari says.

Rival’s reputation

A local BJP worker from Rae Bareli’s Harchandpur assembly segment, the home turf of Dinesh Singh, says the BJP candidate “will not even get votes in Harchandpur”. “Unka vyavhar bahut kharab hai, kisiko chayn se jeene nahi dete (his behaviour is very bad, he doesn’t let anyone live in peace),” the BJP workers says, while alleging that Singh had also “tried to sabotage (Rae Bareli MLA) Aditi Singh’s election... the Thakurs who support her will naturally not support him”.

Abhilash Kaushal, the Unchahar BJP office-bearer quoted earlier, concedes Singh is a “poor choice” but adds that “irrespective of who the party fielded, Rahul would have still won Rae Bareli because this is his first election from here and there is tremendous public support for him”.

Despite a palpable groundswell of support for Rahul across the constituency, Singh asserts, “this is not a contest between Dinesh Singh and Rahul Gandhi, it is a fight that has Narendra Modi and the people of Rae Bareli on one side and a family, which treats Rae Bareli as its personal property, on the other; it is a fight between Sonia Gandhi’s son and Rae Bareli’s son”.

Targeting Gandhi clan

“Everyone in Rae Bareli knows the difference between Dinesh Singh and the Gandhi family. Sonia Gandhi defeated me in 2019 but she never came back to Rae Bareli in the last five years while I continued to live here and work for the people. Rahul has fled after filing his nomination and no one knows if he will even come again before polling to ask for votes; what kind of arrogance is this... the Gandhi family thinks of Rae Bareli voters as its slaves while I see them as my family,” Singh told The Federal.

The BJP’s entire campaign appears to be centred around how “the Gandhi family wins from Rae Bareli but returns to the constituency only once every five years to ask for votes for another term.” It’s the same pitch that Union Home Minister Amit Shah made while campaigning for Singh, on Sunday (May 12), while urging voters to “root out the Gandhi family from Rae Bareli once and for all”.

Congress workers who are managing the Rae Bareli poll campaign under Priyanka Gandhi’s supervision say Rahul will campaign in the constituency and Amethi later this week. Priyanka too makes it a point to tell voters that her bhaiyya (brother) has the “responsibility of campaigning for the Congress across the country” and so she is “asking for your support on his behalf”.

Priyanka’s personal touch

Priyanka’s campaign pitch is simple and laced with a cocktail of nostalgia and emotions. At every corner meeting, door-to-door campaign or impromptu halts to speak to people hoping to catch a glimpse of her, Priyanka reminds voters of the “100-year-old bond” that her family has had with Rae Bareli, going all the way back to 1921, when her great-grandfather Motilal Nehru and grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru had first arrived in the town to express solidarity with families of local farmers who were gunned down by the British controlled Imperial Police during the Munshiganj massacre. She speaks at length of how Indira Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi “nurtured Rae Bareli” and transformed it from a “poverty-stricken place with barren lands to a prosperous district with fertile agricultural fields, an NTPC power plant, schools, hospitals, a railway coach factory and businesses”.

“You are our family. It is not we who have given anything to you but you who have made us what we are today. Modiji and his people will never understand the bond that we share,” Priyanka tells her audience at every public meeting, while also reminding them of the “shahadat” (martyrdom) of her father, Rajiv Gandhi, and her grandmother, Indira Gandhi. She then taps into the current discontent over rising prices and joblessness before listing out the party’s poll promises of providing “loan waivers to farmers, filling up 30 lakh vacancies in government jobs and giving Rs 1 lakh financial aid to the eldest woman in every poor household”, among others.

This build up eventually ends with the predictable appeal for votes for her brother, who Priyanka says, “will further strengthen our family’s bonds with Rae Bareli” and “will work for you till his last breath no matter what you decide in the elections”.

The emotive appeal strikes an instant chord. “The Gandhi family is our family. Priyanka is like our daughter and when the daughter asks for something, we never say no,” says Ramabai, a resident of Rae Bareli assembly segment’s Hardaspur.