Amethi: The desolate highway from Lucknow to Amethi takes you back in time. It’s as if Mandal and Kamandal never happened. The revolutions of caste and religious identity are yet some time away. Politics is divided into two: the Gandhis and anti-Congressism.
The people voting Congress are mostly Brahmins, Muslims and Dalits, much like the Congress “coalition of extremes” with which it once ruled all of Uttar Pradesh. The anti-Congress bloc has some upper castes but mostly OBCs, the people in the middle of the caste pyramid.
It is rare to find Brahmins and Thakurs outside these two seats voting for the Congress in such large numbers. When a group of Brahmins sit around a tea shop and talk about the Congress, they do so with a sense of ownership. It’s their party, the vehicle through which they derive a sense of power. It’s how upper castes in the rest of UP talk about the BJP.
This archaic sense of loyalty is not to the Congress party but the Gandhi dynasty. You will often hear references to Rajiv and Indira Gandhi in conversations here, names that mean nothing outside these two seats.
It’s not as if the winds of change haven’t affected voters here. The Congress has a tough time winning Vidhan Sabha seats here. But the Lok Sabha is a different matter. You can meet voters here voting Congress in the big election and BJP in the small one.
No Gandhi, no Amethi
In the rest of the state, people will tell you that Rahul Gandhi is so poor a politician that they’d rather vote for a disappointing Modi, or even NOTA. In Amethi, you’ll be told, “Amethi ki pehchaan Rahul Gandhi se hai (Amethi is known because of Rahul Gandhi)”.
And that’s the crux of the matter. Amethi and Rae Bareli stick with the Gandhi family because they make these “VIP seats”. It makes these voters VIP too. The only time the Congress lost Amethi after 1977 was in 1998. The Congress candidate was a non-Gandhi, Satish Sharma.
Also read: How Priyanka is making up for Rahul, Sonia absence in Amethi & Rae Bareli
“Amethi and Rae Bareli are famous not just in India but in the world because of the Gandhis,” says a Brahmin RSS worker. “If someone here has a problem and needs help from the administration, he will get a letter from the Congress party office in Amethi. That letter has a different weight than any such from another MP’s office.”
Reporters don’t rush to Pratapgarh or Basti the way they do to Amethi and Rae Bareli. And who has heard of the constituencies like Aonla and Misrikh? Should Amethi defeat Rahul Gandhi, it will only reduce its own importance in national politics. All those projects the BJP is seeking to push to woo Amethi, would it do so if it is no longer a VIP constituency?
In Rae Bareli, there’s still a sense of respect for Sonia Gandhi. Even those not voting for her don’t speak ill of her. In Amethi, however, the sense of disappointment with Rahul Gandhi is so strong that even his voters are unable to defend him. The comparison with what Rajiv Gandhi did for Amethi is stark.
Yet, many still vote for Congress. “Amethi has a debt to pay the Gandhis,” says the RSS worker, whose own vote is for the BJP. “It is a debtor’s guilt.”
As the party structure has weakened, the Congress has been helped by the women’s self-help groups run under the NGO, Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pariyojana, which Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra take very seriously. This election, they have even recruited Leftist activists and students from Delhi’s colleges to come and campaign in Amethi, the sign of a growing nervousness against the BJP’s attack on the Congress bastion.
Status quo
The Modi wave of 2014 caused a tectonic shift in Amethi. The BJP gave the constituency its own star candidate, Smriti Zubin Irani, a former TV actor. She managed to bring down Rahul Gandhi’s winning margin to less than third of what it was.
Also read: Smriti Irani & the BJP have ensured Rahul Gandhi needs to fight for Amethi this time
The shift wasn’t simply a Modi wave but also a change in UP’s caste politics the BJP engineered. The BJP actively wooed non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits — basically, OBCs other than Samajwadi Party’s core vote base and Dalits other than the BSP’s core vote base.
This 2014 shift in favour of BJP is staying in this election, in Amethi as across UP.
Many of those in Amethi who say they are voting for the BJP also voted for the BJP in 2014, but in 2009, they had voted Congress. This election in Amethi, as elsewhere in UP, is largely seeing solidification of the political positions of 2014. There’s little shift this way or that in voter behaviour.
Yadav voters are opposed to the BJP, since the party is keeping them out of the power structure in UP. That’s good enough reason for them to vote for the Congress in Amethi, since the SP does not put up candidates against the Gandhis. What if there was an SP candidate? Yadav voters are unanimous they would have pressed on the SP’s cycle button in that case.
In 2014, the Bahujan Samaj Party had a candidate here, who won less than 58,000 votes, mostly of Jatav Dalits. Most of them say they will vote for Congress, perceiving the BJP to be anti-Dalit, but some are impressed by the BJP’s development work. In other words, the Congress could lose Amethi if the SP and BSP put up their candidates. The credit for making Amethi this tough goes to the BJP and Smriti Irani.
The BJP thinks it could further reduce Rahul Gandhi’s victory margin, not least because Smriti Irani has established a connect with the masses, making herself more visible in the constituency than Rahul and Priyanka put together. Irani’s hard work is appreciated even by those not voting for her, but she’s not VIP enough for Amethi’s pricey voters, certainly not a potential prime minister.