Gandhis split for Amethi, but why has the family deserted it now?

The death of Sanjay Gandhi, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's younger son, in 1980, left behind a big political void for her. Sanjay Gandhi had been her closest political aide throughout the Emergency in the 1970s. He was Indira's chosen political heir. But Indira's plans went awry after he was killed in an air accident in June 1980. His Lok Sabha seat -- Amethi -- was up for grabs.

As Amethi was Sanjay Gandhi's seat, his wife, Maneka Gandhi, had been hopeful of inheriting her husband's legacy. However, Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister and the family matriarch, had different plans.

Maneka Gandhi, who was seen with Sanjay Gandhi on several campaigns in the 1970s, did not like Indira's succession plan. The difference in plans and perspectives of Indira and Maneka led to a fierce fight between the two, eventually splitting the Gandhi-Nehru family over Amethi.

Amethi became a Nehru-Gandhi family bastion, and the Lok Sabha seat was held by Rajiv Gandhi, his wife, Sonia Gandhi, and then their son, Rahul Gandhi.

Amethi is a coveted seat for the Gandhis and no less important than the adjoining Raebareli constituency. However, Amethi will see a non-Gandhi Congress candidate contest from there in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, a first in 25 years.

So why did the Gandhis, who fought tooth and nail over Amethi, suddenly decide to give the family bastion a pass in this election?

CONGRESS LOYALIST KL SHARMA PICKED FOR AMETHI

Viewed as a tectonic policy shift, Amethi won't have a Gandhi candidate for the first time since the 13th Lok Sabha election in 1998. Since then, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have won the Amethi seat, until the Bharatiya Janta Party's Smriti Irani ousted Rahul Gandhi from Amethi by a 55,000-vote margin in the 2019 general election.

Rahul Gandhi, who was expected to avenge his 2019 Amethi defeat and take on incumbent Smriti Irani, shifted to Raebareli, another Congress stronghold.

The Congress, instead, named loyalist Kishori Lal Sharma from Amethi on Friday. The nomination of Sharma, who has served as a representative for several Congress stalwarts including Rajiv Gandhi, Satish Sharma, Sonia Gandhi, and Rahul Gandhi in Amethi and Raebareli, surprised many.

There was intense suspense building up over the candidates for the two Uttar Pradesh constituencies, deemed to be among the few Congress hopes in Uttar Pradesh.

Speaking on the absence of a Gandhi in Amethi and justifying KL Sharma's nomination, local Congress leader Yogendra Mishra said, "KL Sharma is also a part of the (Gandhi) family now. He has worked for the Gandhi family in Amethi for 30–35 years... There is no resentment amongst the workers... The Gandhi family is coming for KL Sharma's nomination. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge will be here..."

Although Yogendra Mishra asserted KL Sharma to be a family member, he did not reveal why Rahul Gandhi was shifted to Raebareli and Amethi was deserted by the Gandhi family.

Whatever the logic and reason, some viewed Rahul Gandhi's absence from Amethi as a face-saving exit, while some hailed it as a masterstroke by the party.

Anyway, the Congress fielding no Gandhi at Amethi certainly gives an opportunity to look back and find out how a fight in and over Amethi was responsible for an irreparable division in the Nehru-Gandhi family, that exists to date.

WHEN AMETHI SPLIT THE NEHRU-GANDHI FAMILY

Although the Congress had been winning Amethi since 1967, when the constituency was created, it lost the seat in the 1977 Lok Sabha election when the opposition's makeshift Janata Party formed the government, following the Emergency.

Soon after, in 1980, Amethi voted for Sanjay Gandhi, and made him the first of the Nehru-Gandhi family to win the seat, months before his death. That explains Maneka Gandhi's claim to the seat.

The discord in the family started showing after Sanjay's death, and eventually led to his wife, Maneka Gandhi, leaving Indira Gandhi's residence with son Varun and ripping the family apart. Amethi was at the heart of that discord.

To fill the vacant Amethi seat, Rajiv Gandhi, who was happy with his career as a pilot with Air India, was nominated for the Amethi by-election by the party led by Indira Gandhi. That was in 1981. Sanjay's widowed wife, Maneka Gandhi, barely 25-years-old at the time, helplessly saw Indira Gandhi passing Sanjay Gandhi's legacy to Rajiv.

Being less than 25, she could not contest for the Lok Sabha seat right then.

"The note of discord was struck by Maneka, who saw with displeasure how her husband’s legacy was snatched away from her by his brother," Spanish writer Javier Moro noted in his book The Red Sari.

Rajiv's win in Amethi in the 1981 bye-polls and his subsequent climb into the party, under his mother's careful watch, hurt Maneka's political ambitions.

The tipping point came when Sanjay's young widow attended a convention in Lucknow organised by Akbar Ahmed, her late husband's confidante. Maneka attended the event, gave a fiery speech and projected that she was going to plunge into active politics, which irked her powerful mother-in-law. This was because Indira was grooming her elder son Rajiv to fill the void left behind by Sanjay Gandhi.

Indira, who was in London, saw Maneka's Lucknow adventure as an attempt at destroying Sanjay Gandhi's image. After she landed back in Delhi, she was determined to put the house in order.

"Indira pointed her finger at Maneka and shouted, 'Get out of this house immediately!'" Javier Moro wrote. "I told you not to speak in Lucknow, but you did exactly what you wanted to and you disobeyed me! There was poison in every single one of your words. Do you think I can't see that? Get out of here! Leave this house right now!" Indira screamed. "Go back to your mother's house!"

As the situation heated up, Maneka packed her stuff, took two-year-old Varun Gandhi and left the Prime Minister's house amid a crowd of photographers, reporters and police personnel, gathered at the entrance gate of the house.

"Photos that fitted the image she (Maneka) wanted to give, of a loyal daughter-in-law treated cruelly by her powerful and authoritarian mother-in-law. Maneka waving to the reporters from the car,' said the caption under the photo that came out the next morning in all the newspapers in India and some abroad," Moro wrote in his book.

"Sanjay's whole style was to unite and rule. His loyalists remained loyal - Mummy wants to divide and rule, pit people against each other, rule through dummies, what else can she expect but total disarray?" Maneka Gandhi told a friend in 1981, according to an India Today magazine report.

The rift between the two, Maneka Gandhi and Indira Gandhi, increased so much that it became difficult for both of them to live together under one roof, according to famed author Khushwant Singh's autobiography.

AMETHI, AFTER THE GANDHI FAMILY SPLIT

After leaving the Prime Minister's house, Menaka, determined to take over Sanjay's political legacy, founded the Rashtriya Sanjay Manch along with Akbar Ahmad, the organiser of the 1982 Lucknow Convention.

To fight Rajiv Gandhi, whom she saw latching on to her husband's legacy, Maneka took the fight to Amethi, the seat which was denied to her in 1981.

She contested the 1984 Lok Sabha elections as an Independent candidate from Amethi against Rajiv Gandhi but was defeated badly, with Rajiv getting over 84% votes. He went on to win the Amethi constituency four times; 1981, 1984, 1989 and 1991.

Rajiv Gandhi's wife, Sonia Gandhi, who left no stone unturned to campaign alongside her husband in 1984, in Amethi, was chosen by the electorate in 1999, making her political debut.

Rahul Gandhi won the seat thrice, starting in 2004, when mother Sonia Gandhi made way for her son and shifted to Raebareli, the other Congress bastion.

Maneka's new venture, Rashtriya Sanjay Manch, which never took off, even tried to get hold of Sanjay Gandhi's assets, with the three-year-old Varun Gandhi as a part of the case.

Maneka, who later joined the Janata Dal in 1988, and the BJP in 2004, never returned to Amethi to take on the Gandhis throughout the 1990s and beyond.

Neither did his son, Varun, who joined the saffron party along with his mother.

The naming of KL Sharma in Amethi constituency, coveted by the Gandhi family, has been abandoned by them, giving birth to curiosity and speculation behind the crucial decision.

WHY DID THE GANDHIS ABABNDON AMETHI?

The Gandhi branch of the family that joined the BJP -- Maneka and son Varun -- moved away from Amethi and focused on the Pilibhit and Sultanpur seats.

It was the Rajiv Gandhi side that stuck to Amethi for 25 years.

The seat remained with Congress, barring in the 1998 election, when it went to the BJP. The Congress candidate that time was Satish Sharma, a non-Gandhi. In the election in 1999, Sonia Gandhi won from Amethi, and the seat was with the family till 2019, when Smriti Irani ousted Rahul Gandhi.

Cut to 2024, as the Congress delayed naming its candidates for Amethi and Raebareli seats, several party leaders and workers were left perplexed. The announcement hold-up, which caused quite a commotion, and was only done on the last day of the nomination, April 3.

While rumours mounted regarding the Grand Old Party's plans to field both Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to run for Amethi and Raebareli, some speculated that both might exchange seats.

In the meantime, posters bearing "Robert Vadra Ab Ki Baar" coming up in Amethi before the nominations fuelled another rumour, the entry of Priyanka Gnadh Vadrai's husband, businessman Robert Vadra, into politics.

However, none of the above happened and party loyalist KL Sharma was named from Amethi.

While Priyanka Gandhi Vadra called KL Sharma's nomination an ideal "sewa ki rajneeti (the politics of service)" for the country, Rahul's Amethi nemesis, Smriti Irani took a dig at the former, asking, "The one who left Amethi for Wayanad, can’t belong to Raebareli. He told the people of Wayanad they were his family. What will he say here?"

Priyanka stressed upon Sharma's 40 years of dedicated work in the region.

The discussions and deliberations over the two VIP seats, which took around two months, were because "neither of the siblings were keen to contest", according to a Times of India report.

Congress chief, Mallikarjun Khadge was said to have persuaded the Gandhi siblings, until Rahul gave in and decided to contest from Raebareli.

Author and political commentator Rasheed Kidwai, in his opinion piece on IndiaToday.In, laid out a number of reasons for Rahul Gandhi contesting Raebareli and leaving Amethi for the Punjab-born Kirhori Lal Sharma. The Ludhiana native has been associated with the Gandhi family since 1983, when Rajiv Gandhi represented Amethi after the death of Sanjay Gandhi.

Firstly, there was pressure from the INDIA bloc ally Samajwadi Party for a Gandhi family member to contest in Uttar Pradesh, leading Rahul Gandhi to choose Raebareli as a second seat, leaving Amethi, which he lost to BJPs Smriti Irani in 2019.

Next came the series of 16 surveys conducted in Amethi and Raebareli by Congress in-house pollsters, all of which predicted the Grand Old Party’s sure-shot victory in Raebareli if a Nehru-Gandhi family member was fielded from there. The feedback from Amethi, however, assured only a 50% chance of success, according to Kidwai.

After nearly 44 years since the Amethi conflict started and fractured the Gandhi family, it's undeniable how they ultimately gave up the prized seat, and fielded none other than Rajiv Gandhi's associate KL Sharma, a non-Gandhi but very much a part of the Gandhi family.