The Raja’s Gambit

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi has of late been extra-attentive to his parliamentary constituency of Amethi. His sister Priyanka too made a round of the Gandhi pocketborough. Usually, she concentrates only on neighbouring Rae Bareli, their mother’s parliamentary constituency. What’s moving the family perhaps is the toughest political challenge Rahul has faced: Sanjay Singh, whom Rahul has since childhood known as ‘Uncle’, a close family friend, is set to oppose him in the 2014 elections as the BJP candidate.

Sanjay belongs to the erstwhile royal family of Amethi. Around the 1970s, his father, the late Raja Rananjay Singh, gradually established links to the Congress. He was instrumental in ushering in Indira Gandhi’s two sons, Sanjay and Rajiv Gandhi, into politics in a region once ruled by his family. Sanjay Gandhi made his formal electoral debut here in the parliamentary poll of 1980; after Sanjay Gandhi’s untimely death in a chopper crash in June that year, his elder brother Rajiv started representing Ame­thi. It was Sanjay Singh, the raja’s son, who took Rajiv around during his first election rounds of Amethi. The same Sanjay ‘Uncle’ seems poised to take on Rajiv’s son Rahul on a BJP ticket.

Sanjay and his wife Ameeta have switched political parties enough times. He first parted ways with the Gandhis in 1988, joining the Janata Dal, headed by V.P. Singh, who was his first wife Garima’s uncle. When VP became prime minister, Sanjay was made communications minister. In 1998, he switched to the BJP and defeated Satish Sharma, who had been fielded by the Congress from the Amethi Lok Sabha constituency after Rajiv’s assassination. In a snap election the very next year, Sanjay lost to Rajiv’s widow Sonia Gandhi.

Ameeta has thrice been MLA, twice from the BJP and once from the Congress. The former badminton star was widowed by the killing of her husband and badminton star Syed Modi. She married Sanjay after that. Ameeta is often credited with the thinking behind these tactical switches. Although the couple are tight-lipped, Sanjay’s drift towards the BJP was evident at his birthday celebration in his palace Bhupati Bhawan, some 140 km from Lucknow, last week: about a dozen BJP leaders were present on the dais. Ameeta dismisses questions about the BJP tilt. “Leaders from different political parties were present at the celebrations. There’s no need to read any political overtones into it,” she says. It is learnt that Ameeta has been unhappy with the Gandhis since the time Sanjay got elected to the Lok Sabha from  the Sultanpur constituency, neighbouring Amethi. The Gandhis hadn’t canvassed for him even though they visited Amethi many times around election time. In the 2012 assembly elections, Ameeta lost by a mere 300 votes, and is known to think this might not have happened if the Gandhis had cared to campaign for her.

To an extent, Sanjay and Ameeta may have gauged the mood of the people correctly. There’s a degree of disillusionment with the Congres evident in the constituency; even Congress workers are expressing their unhappiness with Rahul. “What has Rahul Gandhi done in all these years?” asks Raj Karan Singh, a former Congress MP. “He has given nothing to Amethi. It continues to look like a village.” Rahul has also come in for ridicule from former chief minister Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party: when her government created a separate Amethi district, she chided Rahul for failing people who had for decades reposed faith in the Gandhi clan. Indeed, the people of Amethi seem to yearn for much more than the meagre development the Gandhis have brought there. Do they see Sanjay, their familiar raja, doing better?