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12-04-2024
RAEBARELI/ HALOL: The city of Raebareli in northern India has for most of the last 75 years been the political fiefdom of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that dominates the once-powerful Congress party and provided three of the nation’s prime ministers. But, with India’s general election just weeks away, the party’s central offices there tell the story of its decline.
Clothes dried in the courtyard, while a washing machine beeped and a family living out of the office went about its morning chores. No other Congress workers were present.
“Some people here say the end of the Gandhi era is now imminent,” said teacher K.C. Shukla, a Congress member who resides in the house where his relatives had set up a party office decades ago.
Raebareli is one of just 17 constituencies being contested by the Congress party in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is targeting a clean sweep of its 80 seats in the lower house of parliament.
Virtually all opinion polls suggest Modi’s Hindu nationalist party will return to power for a rare third term and dominate in Uttar Pradesh when results from the seven-phase election are announced on June 4.
Neither party has yet named its candidate for Raebareli, though both BJP and Congress officials said an announcement would be made this week. The seat was represented by Congress’s long-time president, Sonia Gandhi, from 2004 until she entered the upper house of parliament this year.
Reuters interviewed 21 lawmakers, party officials and analysts, including 13 members of Congress, for this story. Many of them described a party that faces another big loss in Uttar Pradesh, and risks losing its status as India’s main opposition group as rival regional parties make gains elsewhere in the country.
They blamed what they described as lacklustre management by Sonia and her son Rahul, Modi’s leading national critic, and the family’s inability to rally the country’s fractured centre and centre-left opposition.
Over two dozen opposition parties, including Congress, formed the anti-BJP “INDIA” coalition last year but the bloc has been riven by bickering and defections by important members.
Major regional parties such as West Bengal’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh have declined to contest the election with Congress and are running candidates against both BJP and the Gandhis’ party.
Rahul’s office declined an interview request. When asked by Reuters at a campaign rally about his political future and opinion polls, he said: “My job is to spread political activism; results can never be predicted.” He did not comment when asked about divisions among the opposition.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge told media that the “alliance reflects the true spirit of democracy: we are together against Modi,” though Congress was willing to fight alone if needed.
Asked about the risk of Congress losing its status as one of India’s big two parties, Kharge said his focus was on defeating the BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology, and not Congress’s strength relative to other parties.
The BJP’s critics, who say that Modi’s government discriminates against religious minorities such as Muslims and has weaponized law enforcement agencies against political opponents, fear a third term would be corrosive to democracy in the world’s most populous nation.
The government has rejected allegations that it has hounded opposition leaders with federal investigations and Modi denies that there is religious discrimination in India. (BBC)
