Rae Bareli, The photos on the walls of the Congress’s election headquarters here tell the story of a constituency the party has held captive for most of the six decades since 1952.They are a happy cast of characters: Feroze Gandhi, who won the seat in 1952 and 1957 with wife Indira Gandhi as his
The BJP held the seat twice, in 1996 and 1998, when the Gandhis were in political seclusion. Rae Bareli decisively rejected the family just once, when Raj Narain unseated Indira in 1977.For the Congress, the constituency is something of an oasis in an Uttar Pradesh that seems charmed by Narendra Modi. Sonia is safe in her seat, the only debate being whether she can better her 2009 victory margin of 3.72 lakh.“It may go down by 15 to 20 per cent,” said Ram Naresh Mishra, a former state roadways employee from Bachrawan town, at a tea stall. But the schoolteacher seated next to him was more cautious“We have to vote our hearts out for Soniaji,” he said. “This business of a reduced margin can get dicey because you can never tell by how much it will fall.Underlying the teacher’s manifest commitment to Sonia was his sense of history. “Once Rae Bareli defeated Indira, she turned her back on its voters forever. We learnt a lesson. Our city regressed into a village,” he said.After the 1977 reverse, Indira had won from Rae Bareli in 1980 too but relinquished it in favour of her other seat, Medak.“Sonia has given us everything: a rail coach factory, wide roads, a flyover that’s about to take shape…” the teacher said.Rae Bareli has vested the Gandhis with such an aura that Brajesh Gupta, a lawyer from Harchandpur, claimed: “If (Narendra) Modi were bold enough to stand against Soniaji, even he would have lost.”
He continued: “No doubt, Modi’s name is on everyone’s lips but ours is a VVIP constituency that has earned a place on the international map because of Soniaji’s personality, the Gandhi legacy and the work they have done.”The refrain of Priyanka’s speeches, while campaigning for Sonia, has been the “work” done in the past five years and the “contrasting ideologies” of the Congress and the BJP.“Roads, electricity poles, solar lights, factories, an AIIMS-like hospital — we have brought all this to Rae Bareli,” Priyanka told Aihar village on Friday.“Modi talks of entrepreneurship, jobs…. We don’t care for his ideas, for even if some projects here mainly benefit outsiders, the good thing is that the Gandhis have at least brought them to our town,” said Bachchan Singh, a Lucknow University law student who is a voter in Rae Bareli.In the 2012 Assembly polls, the Samajwadi Party defeated the Congress in four Rae Bareli seats. This time, the Samajwadis haven’t put up a candidate against Sonia.
“Those were state elections, so we had to choose between the Samajwadis and the Bahujan Samaj Party. This time the choice is between the BJP and the Congress,” said Bhagwan Baksh Singh, former headman of Bannamau village.
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