BJP's quest to wrest last citadel of Congress in Uttar Pradesh

New Delhi: The recent cross-voting and realignment in Uttar Pradesh Rajya Sabha polls allude towards a determined bid by the BJP to hem in the Gandhi family in Raebareli, the Congress bastion and lone seat won by the party in the state in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Manoj Pandey, the three-time MLA and former Samajwadi Party whip who led the rebellion and voted with six other MLAs to help BJP win an extra seat in the Upper House hails from Unchahar, one of the 5 Assembly segments in Raebareli Lok Sabha constituency.

Considered close to Akhilesh Yadav, Pandey’s volta face has come as a shock to the Opposition camp and disrupts caste and political equations in the seat which Sonia Gandhi would vacate after her nomination to the Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan.

It is not clear whether someone from the Gandhi family would contest Raebareli, a seat Sonia has won five consecutive times since 2004 but with diminishing margins since the UPA lost power in 2014. But retaining Raebareli would be a matter of prestige for Congress.  

In 2019, when Sonia won Raebareli by a margin of more than 1.65 lakh votes, two out of 5 Assembly segments that make the LS constituency had Congress MLAs, including Aditi Singh, whose grandfather Dhunni Singh was a close Indira Gandhi aide when the former PM represented the seat.

Aditi is now a BJP legislator having deserted the Congress. The remaining 4 seats, including Pandey from Unchahar, were won by the SP in the 2022 Assembly polls while Congress drew a blank.

It is not clear whether the BJP would nominate Pandey from the Raebareli LS seat, but by bringing a strong local Brahmin face on board, the BJP is attempting to paper over the traditional Brahmin-Thakur fault line in the Avadh region.

BJP has sought to further squeeze the Congress in Raebareli by nominating Amarpal Maurya to the Rajya Sabha. Maurya belongs to the Most Backward Caste and the community has a substantial presence in the district. Maurya was a BJP candidate from Unchahar in the 2022 Assembly elections but lost to Pandey by less than 7,000 votes.

Interestingly, former UP minister Swami Prasad Maurya, who recently resigned from SP to float his outfit, is also from Raebareli. He is reportedly inching closer to the I.N.D.I.A bloc and may come in handy for the Congress in its attempts to shore up its chances in the lone LS seat in UP after Rahul Gandhi lost to Union minister Smriti Irani from Amethi in 2019.