If there is an electoral contest that has the the twists and turns of a Bollywood script, of tears and betrayal, it is at the Amethi Assembly constituency in Uttar Pradesh. It has a riveting star-cast: Congress strongman Sanjay Sinh’s wife Amita Sinh, his former wife Garima Sinh, and Gayatri Prajapati. The three have different stories to tell and hope that the audience believes in their respective versions. All of them are backed by different parties and their formidable organisations.
The first reason for intrigue is that, despite the alliance between the Congress and the Samajwadi Party, the two have put up candidates against each other in this constituency. It is said to be a friendly fight, but the contest is anything but friendly. Amita of the Congress is determined to punish Prajapati of the Samajwadi Party. She is banking on her husband’s clout and her bahu rani image. She is also seeking to impress the voters with her sustained commitment to the constituency. Prajapati is the sitting Legislator and enjoys the support of his party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, though not of Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav. He is tainted with an FIR filed against him, accusing him of rape.
Besides, he is said to be involved in illegal sand mining. He is thus desperate for a victory to salvage his image. The friendliness in the fight is further missing since a division of votes between Amita and Prajapati can only benefit the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate, Garima Sinh.
The second reason has to do with family drama. Amita toppled Garima’s position as Sanjay Sinh’s wife, and since then the two women have been duelling for the family’s legacy and legitimacy. Amita had a turbulent past before she became Sanjay Sinh’s wife. She had been married to badminton player Syed Modi who was shot dead in 1988, when he was just 26. The police had filed murder charges against Amita and Sanjay Sinh with whom she had got close. Nothing came of that and eventually the two married.
The Bharatiya Janata Party fielded Garima Sinh with the hope that the outcome will be mutually beneficial. The BJP has a face that connects with the electorate there. Garima Sinh now has a political platform from which she can continue her battle with her former husband and his current wife. She is the original bahu rani and her rival, both in political and personal meanings, is being projected as a usurper. Garima is seeking to draw sympathy from the voters for her plight, having being ousted as the legitimate wife. The sanctity of marriage is being invoked. An added masala is the ongoing legal battle with her former husband over material goods.
The third reason which adds to the flavour is that the Assembly segment is part of the Lok Sabha constituency represented by Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi. He is now a three-time Member of Parliament from Amethi, having been elected first in 2004. The Assembly constituency is thus a prestige issue for him. This is one reason why, despite a tie-up with the Samajwadi Party, the Congress did not let go of the seat and put up its candidate against its coalition partner.
Rahul Gandhi will want to see Amita win. It will be a vindication of his hold there. As it is, his grip on the constituency has weakened. In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, his victory margin shrunk to just a little over a lakh, the lowest since 2004; in 2009 he had won with a massive margin of more than 3.7 lakh votes. The BJP’s Smriti Irani put up a fight that took the Congress camp by rude surprise.
There are many commentators who maintain that the margin could have been even smaller had Priyanka Gandhi Vadra not pitched in for her brother in the last moments of the contest. It may be recalled that in the early hours of counting, Rahul Gandhi had actually been trailing behind Irani, with even minority-dominated Assembly segments showing signs of abandoning the party and its high-profile candidate. In fact, in those places, he barely managed to scrape through. In Amethi proper, the BJP had polled more than 46,000 votes. The ‘outsider’ Irani had nearly stormed the Nehru-Gandhi fortress – and this after coming late into the contest.
But while the Congress somehow held on to Amethi in the Lok Sabha election, it has been less of a success in Assembly polls. And this is the fourth larger reason why not just Amethi but also the other four Assembly segments are important for the party. In the 2012 Assembly election in Uttar Pradesh, the party could win only two of the five Assembly constituencies — Tiloi and Jagdishpur. Taken together with the other Family pocket borough, Rae Bareli, there are 10 Assembly seats. The Congress could not win even a single Assembly seat from Rae Bareli in 2012; it was a distant third in three of the five seats there. Compare this with the seven seats the Congress got in total from the two parliamentary constituencies in 2007, and the decline is evident. As if this was not enough, the party faced a rout in adjoining Sultanpur, which too has traditionally been handed out to Nehru-Gandhi loyalists. All its five seats were secured by the Samajwadi Party.
(The writer is a senior political commentator and public affairs analyst)
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