With no hopes of retaining the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat in the upcoming 2024 general elections, Congress supremo Sonia Gandhi fled to Rajasthan to file a nomination for the Rajya Sabha seat from the state her party recently lost. This step came in sharp similarity with her son Rahul Gandhi’s escape from the Amethi battlefield in 2019. Rahul Gandhi – sensing an inevitable defeat in Amethi – had contested the last Lok Sabha elections with Muslim-majority Wayanad in Kerala as his second constituency.
This time, the Lok Sabha elections have a backdrop of the NDA government’s impeccable performance and a vibe of pro-Modi enthusiasm in the country after the Ram Mandir consecration. As a result, Sonia Gandhi is fetching grounds to retain her membership in the parliament through the Rajya Sabha instead of facing an election.
Rae Bareli – the fortress of Gandhi family – is not a safe seat for Congress anymore.
Before discussing the speculations and probable reasons for the Congress queen leaving her family fortress, let’s delve into her Lok Sabha performance in the past elections. In the 2014 general elections, she won from Rae Bareli against Ajay Agarwal of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Sonia Gandhi bagged 526434 votes which was 52.43% of the total votes cast. Ajay Agarwal got 173721 votes which was 42.45% votes.
In 2019, Sonia Gandhi received 534918 votes (57.20%) when she defeated Dinesh Pratap Singh of the Bharatiya Janata Party who got 367740 votes (39.34%). What is worrying Sonia Gandhi is not the vote percentage. It is a sheer rise in the actual number of votes cast in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The winning margin of Sonia Gandhi reduced from 352713 in 2014 to 167178 in 2019.
Rahul Gandhi had to run away to Kerala from Uttar Pradesh
A similar situation was seen in Amethi with Rahul Gandhi. In 2009, Rahul Gandhi secured 464195 votes which was 71.8% of the total votes cast. He defeated Ashish Shukla of the Bahujan Samaj Party who got 93997 votes which is 14.5%. BJP candidate Pradeep Kumar Singh received 37570 votes which was 5.8% of the total votes. Rahul Gandhi’s winning margin was 370198.
In the 2014 elections, stats showed a sharp decline in the vote share of Rahul Gandhi. In 2014, BJP leader Smriti Irani fought against him from Amethi. She received 300748 votes (34.38%) while Rahul Gandhi received 408651 votes (46.71%). His winning margin came down to 107903 votes. This was an alarming signal for the Congress party to rethink the ways to send the scion to Lok Sabha again in 2019.
Why Wayanad?
In 2019, the grand old party resorted to its appeasement policies and chose the Muslim-dominated Wayanad constituency in Kerala as the second seat to fight for Rahul Gandhi. This was done to ensure his membership in Lok Sabha in case he lost Amethi – one of the traditional seat of the Gandhi family.
In 2019, Smriti Irani defeated Rahul Gandhi from Amethi. She received 467598 (49.78%) votes and Rahul Gandhi got 412668 (44.55%). These numbers are self-explanatory to reveal how Rahul Gandhi was afraid of losing this election and chose to go to Wayanad instead of defending his family’s traditional seat.
Is Congress planning to (re)launch Priyanka Vadra from Rae Bareli?
It is being speculated that Sonia Gandhi is vacating the Rae Bareli seat because her daughter Priyanka Vadra can be the potential Congress candidate from the ‘family bastion’. A section of Congress of workers still believes that the Gandhi princess, having a nose similar to that of her grandmother Indira Gandhi and a husband entangled in multiple frauds and land grabbing cases will win from Rae Bareli to further the family tradition from Rae Bareli which has historically been ‘in the family’. But this is far from reality.
Priyanka Vadra has been the General Secretary of the party for a long time. She was given the charge of campaigning in the Rae Bareli and Amethi constituencies in the 2014 general elections. Interestingly, the Congress party could win on the very two seats out of 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh at that time. BJP-led NDA won 73 seats and the Samajwadi Party won 5 seats – all shared among the Yadav family. Opposition in Uttar Pradesh was reduced to 7 seats only revealing the true face of the dynastic parties.
A brief report card of Priyanka Vadra
Priyanka Vadra has, over the years, taken various responsibilities in the party organisation in various elections. Congress fought the 2022 assembly elections of Uttar Pradesh under what they call the ‘charismatic’ leadership of Priyanka Vadra. She gave the slogan – ‘Ladki Hoon, Lad Sakti Hoon’. This slogan means ‘I am a girl, I can fight’. In the results of those elections, it was revealed that she could not give any significant fight to the good governance model proposed and executed by Yogi Adityanath.
In 2019, Priyanka Vadra was heading the Congress campaign in Uttar Pradesh for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as a general secretary for the Congress party. The 17th Lok Sabha elections saw a decisive victory for the Narendra Modi-led NDA alliance, winning 354 seats, with BJP alone victorious on 303 seats. The extent of Modi’s dominance was evident while analysing the figures pouring in from the Election Commission for the country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. In the state, Congress fielded 67 candidates and lost security deposit in 63 of them.
Priyanka Vadra helped Congress lose deposits in Uttar Pradesh
According to the Election Commission set rules and norms, if a candidate fails to get 1/6th of votes (16.67%) of votes polled in a constituency, such a candidate stands to lose the security deposit. Based on this rule, only four Congress candidates in UP got their security deposits back, the deposit for the remaining 63 was lost. The 4 seats where Congress managed to save deposits were Amethi, Rae Bareli, Saharanpur and Kanpur. Sonia Gandhi won from Rae Bareli, the only seat that Congress won in Uttar Pradesh, where the SP-BSP alliance did not field a candidate. Smriti Irani pulled off a splendid victory against Congress president Rahul Gandhi in Amethi.
So the report card of Priyanka Vadra says that let alone retaining Rae Bareli by winning it in the 2024 general elections, she is unfit to contest the seat in the first place. This is because the historic loss of Congress in Amethi and the significant rise in the number of votes in favour of the BJP in Rae Bareli constituency has manifested only under the ‘charismatic’ leadership of Priyanka Vadra.
Is Sonia Gandhi afraid of losing Rae Bareli just like her son lost Amethi?
Seemingly the reason behind Sonia Gandhi’s escape to Rajasthan is that Congress is afraid of another historic loss in the upcoming elections – this time in Rae Bareli. Notably, Smriti Irani’s victory in Amethi did not come just like that. She spent much time working in Amethi after losing the seat in 2014. After winning in 2019, she promised that the BJP would sweep the adjacent Rae Bareli as well.
With the penetration of various schemes of the central and the state government to the remote interiors of these two constituencies, the electoral turnout and the mindset of the voters have experienced a paradigm shift in the last few years. This shift is potent enough to shake the Congress supremo to the core. It is the fear of an insulting loss ahead in May 2024 that she opted to get a Rajya Sabha seat and ran away to Rajasthan – a state Congress recently lost to the BJP after multiple cases of rape atrocities on women.
The BJP has already started calling it an act of surrender.
Uttar Pradesh is already leading the prevalent Ram vibe in the country after the consecration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya which is not far away from the Gandhi family strongholds. Diminishing winning leads in Rae Bareli implies that even if Priyanka Vadra contests this seat, she is likely to lose it. Even if she wins, the margin can be as meagre as it can be. In case of her loss, the party may resort to citing electoral beginnings for her in ‘tough’ times. But if Sonia Gandhi loses the Lok Sabha election, it will be a yet greater embarrassment.
With top leader Sonia Gandhi opting not to face the supreme test of mass appeal the Congress party may further see a lower tally in Lok Sabha than what it has now. It sends a message that the party president lacks the courage to face the Hindutva wave in the country. Sonia Gandhi’s Rajya Sabha entry from Rajasthan therefore brings nothing to the table for Congress except saving a Luteyns’ bungalow at 10, Janpath Road in New Delhi.