Amethi/Raebareli: With the Lok Sabha elections underway, the people of the adjacent constituencies of Amethi and Raebareli in central Uttar Pradesh, are not surprised to have journalists flocking their villages and asking them about who they will vote for.
With the two constituencies being bastions of the Gandhi family, local residents are used to media attention for at least five decades.
“The Gandhi family has given us our identity. Indira (Gandhi) may have gone, but she lives on in Raebareli,” says Ram Bahadur Yadav, who runs a small grocery shop right opposite Sonia Gandhi’s pristine white bungalow fenced by a 12-ft high boundary wall, in Bhuemau village.
“You tell me, would you have come to this village all the way if not for the Gandhis? We would have been like any other village in India.”
The people of the two constituencies, which have been represented by the Gandhis for decades — right from 1952 when Raebareli elected Feroze Gandhi as its MP — seem to live in a different time zone.
Here, the primary political figures in roadside chatter over cups of tea remain the Gandhis. The stories of how the Gandhis first set foot — Indira Gandhi in Raebareli, and Sanjay and Rajiv in Amethi; the way they would interact with the villagers; the development projects they delivered — are carried from generation to generation, almost as family lores.
As Vijay Vidrohi, a lawyer and communist leader from Raebareli, says, “Here, there is a generation of people who will tell you how Indira touched and hugged them, how she gave a packet of bindis to the women folk — those memories are very much alive.”
For outsiders, Amethi and Raebareli are minefields when it comes to how the Gandhis are viewed by the local residents. One can sense that the relationship between the two constituencies and the Gandhi family is marked with a sense of betrayal, abandonment and resentment over the years.
Dilapidated, dusty roads, absence of thriving industries, and unemployment — there is little about the two constituencies that justifies their ‘VIP’ tag. And if the people of Amethi and Raebareli have supported the Gandhis for so long, they also hold them — especially Sonia and Rahul — responsible for their plight today.
Yet, in Amethi and Raebareli, the BJP’s nationwide narrative against dynasty politics has few takers. Even those who resent Rahul and Sonia speak with a sense of betrayal, and not any principled opposition to dynasts.
As Mohammad Sadar, a BJP voter, who claims to have been pulled out of legal trouble by Union minister and Amethi MP Smriti Irani, says, “Parivar ki virasat aadmi ko kab tak bachayegi? (Till when will family legacy save a person) What about Amethi looks like it is a VIP constituency?”
“Yes, we have drawn our identity from them. People felt that they belong to the PM’s own constituency, that we are not like other ordinary people,” he says. “But what did they do? He (Rahul) just packed up and went to Wayanad.”
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The impact of history
“It was Raebareli that first made the Congress party a party of peasants, labourers and the poor,” says Vidrohi. “In 1921, there was a massive peasant revolt, and dozens of peasants were killed in police firing at Sai River…It was called a mini Jallianwala Bagh incident.”
“It was then that Nehru had come to Raebareli for the first time…After that incident, Raebareli became his ‘karmabhoomi’. He began to monitor it regularly, and when the first elections happened in independent India, he sent his son-in-law Feroze Gandhi to fight here,” Vidrohi says.
Locally known as the Munshiganj goli kand, the episode is widely remembered by the people of Raebareli as the starting point of their relationship with the Nehru-Gandhi family. “After that, Indira used to come as a child with her father here,” Vidrohi says. “She was seven when she started coming here, and spent almost her entire life in the midst of people here.”
In Raebareli, there are many storytellers, who willingly narrate their memories of Indira Gandhi. “She would sit on bullock carts and travel from village to village — always making sure that she had a pallu over her head to make sure she respected people’s sentiments,” says Yadav. “Aakhir sasural tha unka (Raebareli was her marital home, after all)”.
It was after Feroze’s death that Indira fought the election from Raebareli in 1967, giving the constituency its first stint with political limelight.
In neighbouring Amethi too, similar stories abound. “The relationship of the Gandhis with Amethi goes back to when the Raja of Amethi, Rananjay Singh’s kingdom was to be seized by the British government, and he asked Motilal Nehru to fight the case for him,” says Shitla Mishra, a senior journalist and lawyer from Amethi.
Rananjay Singh was the father of now BJP leader Sanjay Singh. “It was then that the families became very close. In fact, Indira used to call Rananjay Singh ‘chacha ji’,” Mishra adds. “When Sanjay (Gandhi) grew up, Rananjay Singh asked Indira to send him to Amethi and fight elections, and that’s how this story began.”
Even now, a particular story of Sanjay Gandhi purportedly lifting sacks of cement on his head and helping make a road in Amethi when he first came here is told over and over again by people. “The family helped build Amethi from scratch. You can ask every child in Amethi, and they will tell you how Sanjay Gandhi physically constructed a road when he first came here,” says Pankaj Pandey, who claims to be a devout Congress supporter.
More than anything, people recall how Indira and Sanjay came to Raebareli and Amethi, respectively, immediately after they were voted out in 1977 due to widespread anger over the forced sterilisation implemented during the Emergency.
“Indira did not abandon Raebareli after she was voted out,” says Vidrohi. “She came back the same year. It was a spectacle worth seeing — people had voted her out, and then when she came to the GTC maidan, there was no space to stand in its 10 km radius,” he says. “People were crying inconsolably.”
Those were the decades of one-party dominance, and the significance of being represented by the Congress leaders and the prime ministers was not lost on the people of Amethi and Raebareli. It formed their very identity — one that is hard to erase completely even as the Congress party is now a far cry from its heydays.
Decades of development
It is not just the emotional connection that binds the people of Amethi and Raebareli to the Gandhis. It is the decades of development, as they recall, that the two constituencies saw when the Gandhis ruled the country.
“Everything you see in Raebareli was given by Indira Gandhi,” says Ram Bahadur Verma, a former principal of the Feroze Gandhi College (built in 1960 by Feroze when he was MP), as he begins to list the former prime minister’s achievements. “She made Raebareli an industrial hub — at one point, there were over 140 factories,” recalls the octogenarian. “The Indian Telephone Industries, sugar mill, NTPC, Fursatganj airport, spinning company (read, mills) — all were brought by Indira.”
According to old media reports, between 1973 and 1975, Indira Gandhi had set up two industrial belts in Raebareli, and in 1975, in a joint initiative, UP Small Industries Corporation and Bank of Baroda selected 15 graduate engineers from across the country to establish industry in the constituency. With Congress governments both at the Centre and Uttar Pradesh, the industries were given cheap bank loans and high subsidies, and with two dozen factories making everything from electronics to fabrics to iron works, industry in Raebareli thrived.
“She nurtured Raebareli like a mother nurtures her child. How can this relationship be forgotten?” Verma asks.
However, as argued by senior journalist Abhigyan Prakash in the book ‘From Lucknow to Lutyens: The Power and Plight of Uttar Pradesh’, while the city’s landscape indeed transformed before 1980 — as it got a massive telegraph office, a modern hospital, a degree college, among other establishments — its sheen began to fade immediately after. “Its reputation as a model district and industrial hub received a huge setback, and her (Indira’s) assassination in 1984 further contributed to its decline.”
Ever since, many observers argue that Raebareli exists as a VIP constituency only on paper. In 1980, after the fall of the Janata Party government, Indira contested from Raebareli and Medak in Karnataka. While she won from both the seats, Indira chose to retain Medak, while Raebareli was handed over to her nephew, Arun Nehru — bringing to a halt, they say, the era of development that the constituency had witnessed when it was represented by the PM.
Similarly, Amethi, which had Sanjay, Rajiv, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi as its MPs, was sought to be developed as an industrial hub first by Sanjay.
“During their (Sanjay and Rajiv’s) time, firms like Bharat Heavy Electricals (BHEL) and Indo-Gulf Fertilizers opened units in Amethi, but after Rajiv Gandhi’s demise most of the units closed down,” Prakash writes.
Rajiv Gandhi, who came as an MP to the constituency in 1981, a year after his brother’s death, is said to have delivered a string of development projects other than these two. The ACC cement plant in the Gauriganj assembly constituency, the Sanjay Gandhi Memorial Hospital in Munshiganj, Arif cement factory, Malvika Steel factory, GCI Cement Works, Amethi Textiles, a paper mill are among a series of projects brought by the former prime minister to make Amethi the VIP constituency that its voters always hoped for.
It’s a legacy that even BJP leaders find hard to contend with. “You are unlikely to find anyone in Amethi who will have a bad thing to say about Rajiv Gandhi,” says Kashi Prasad Tripathi, a senior BJP leader from Amethi. “When he would come, he would call the village pradhans and sarpanches by their name — that was his hold over the constituency,” he says. “Unke zamane mein bohot vikas hua Amethi ka. (Amethi developed a lot during his time).”
His counterparts in Raebareli remember Indira even more fondly. “There was a world of a difference between her Congress and the Congress of today,” says BJP district president Buddhilal Pasi. “Hers was a different time — when she would come, the whole district would descend to see her. And of course, she was an iron lady…unka ishara hi kaafi hota tha (Her gesture was enough).”
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The years of apathy
For the people of the constituencies, their relationship with the Gandhis began to weaken soon after Indira and Rajiv’s deaths. According to several Congress supporters as well, the two heirs of the Gandhi family never did justice to the political legacy — even as they were in power at the Centre for ten years between 2004 and 2014.
According to data by the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Uttar Pradesh government, as of 2011-12, the contribution of Amethi and Raebareli to the GSDPstood at 0.71 percent and 0.92 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the contribution of districts like Unnao, Sitapur and Kheri stood at 1.24, 1.76 and 1.95 percent, respectively. As of 2019-2020, while Amethi ranked 65th out of 75 districts in UP in terms of their contribution to the GSDP, Raebareli ranked 37th.
“Rahul and Sonia were voted over and over again by the people of Amethi and Raebareli because of Indira, Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi,” says Mishra, the senior journalist. “But Rahul could not nurture the seed that was sown by Sanjay and Rajiv in Amethi into a plant.”
Across the two constituencies, Sonia and Rahul hardly visiting the seats is a talking point for their detractors and supporters, who often find themselves conjuring up excuses for their leaders’ long absences.
“I set up this shop two years ago, and I was pretty excited that I will see Sonia, or Rahul come by,” says 36-year-old Abhishek Trivedi, who runs a garment shop opposite Sonia Gandhi’s bungalow in Raebareli, in a mocking tone. “But I have never seen them come here ever. What sort of MPs do that? Even when Rahul brought his Nyay yatra, he never came to his house.”
Immediately, his friend-and-customer Raj Kumar Sachan joins the conversation. “Of course, big leaders don’t come often. You think Modi ji goes to Varanasi that frequently?” he asks.
Even the development projects initiated by Sonia and Rahul pale in comparison to Indira and Rajiv’s, at least in people’s imagination.
In 2007, Sonia had laid the foundation stone for the Rail Coach factory in Lalganj with a budget of over Rs 1,600 crore just weeks before the state elections. But eventually, the coaches were actually built in Kapurthala, and few from Raebareli were employed in the factory.
Six years on, she laid the foundation stone for Uttar Pradesh’s first AIIMS in Raebareli, approved the setting up of National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) and National Institute of Pharmaceutical and Research (NIPER). But with the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) shunted out of power in 2014, the projects never saw the light of day.
Moreover, at a time when there were Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Samajwadi Party (SP) governments in the state, there were frequent complaints of delays in clearances for projects in Raebareli.
The same is said about Amethi, too. Several projects announced during the UPA years with Rahul as the MP — the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology, Hindustan Paper Mill, a food park in Jagdishpur, and the Samrat Cycle Factory — remained stuck due to delay in clearances. However, Rahul is credited with setting up the Indira Gandhi Eye Hospital & Research Centre in 2005, and the local eye camps and self-help groups in the constituency.
Yet, as expressed by Rakesh Shilpkar, a tile shop owner, for a constituency that has remained backward on several development indices, the developmental projects implemented by Rahul are perceived as “unth ke muh mein jeera (too insignificant to count)”.
In February, Sonia Gandhi, who had been an MP from Raebareli since 2004, became a Rajya Sabha member from Rajasthan amid rumours and hopes from party workers that her daughter Priyanka would make her much awaited electoral debut and fight from the constituency.
The BJP, meanwhile, seems to be waiting for the Congress to make the first move and announce their candidate. “Humara pratyashi toh hamesh kamal ka phool hai (Our candidate is always a lotus flower, read the party),” says Dinesh Tripathi, BJP’s district mahamantri. “Let them come up with their candidate — anyway, this is hardly a Gandhi bastion now. Their vote share has been consistently dipping and they know it.”
In 2019, Sonia Gandhi defeated BJP’s Dinesh Pratap Singh, who is in the running for a BJP ticket this time around too, by 1.67 lakh votes — her victory margin falling by more than half since 2014 when she had won by 3.52 lakh votes.
A decades-long legacy hangs by a thread
Meanwhile, while rumours abound about Rahul announcing his candidature from Amethi after Wayanad goes to polls on 26 April, there is no official word on it — even as party workers run quiet whisper campaigns across the constituency, convincing people that Rahul will indeed come.
The lack of clarity over whether Rahul will fight from Amethi or not isa campaign plank for Smriti Irani, who defeated Rahul by 55,120 votes in 2019. While Rahul stalls on Amethi, Irani — or, Didi ji as her supporters call her — has been campaigning aggressively for over a month.
“I have seen people change their colours in politics a lot, but I have not seen anyone change their family,” she told a crowd at an event organised by the Brahmin Swabhiman Ekta Manch on Ram Navami. “Now, he goes about telling people in Wayanad that they are his family…But we must be alert, he will come after 26 to divide us,” she said.
Amethi and Raebareli will vote on 20 May, while the last date for filing nominations is 3 May.
Meanwhile, there seems no urgency in the Congress party to reclaim the legacy seat. A Congress worker, however, conceded that people’s patience may be running out. “We sense it all the time. But all we do is to try and convince them that Rahul and Priyanka will come — if they don’t, there is a chance that the legacy will be permanently undone.”
For the people of Amethi and Raebareli, though, the fact that Rahul and Sonia seem to have taken them for granted is more hurtful than the BJP’s political rhetoric suggests.
“We really thought that our lives were intertwined,” says 80-year-old Vikas Pasi, a paan shop owner. “But they clearly don’t feel so. Today, when our children and grandchildren ask why I support the Congress, I don’t have much to say… But in my heart I know I can only support them,” he says. “If Priyanka and Modi fight here, I will vote for Priyanka too.”
(Edited by Tony Rai)