India’s biggest election prize: Can the Gandhi family survive Modi?

The pocket boroughs of Amethi and Rae Bareli have stood by the first family of Indian politics through ups and downs. On May 20, they will be tested again.

Amethi/Rae Bareli, India – Irfan*, a tea stall owner, is convinced that change is afoot.

“There has not been much traffic on this road from Rae Bareli to Amethi ever since the Congress lost power in 2014,” he says, referring to two towns and a party that for decades have been synonymous with one family – the Nehru-Gandhis, or as they are more commonly known, the Gandhis.

The first family of Indian politics has ruled the country for almost half of its journey since independence in 1947, with three generations of prime ministers: Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi, and grandson Rajiv Gandhi. And through ups and downs, when the Congress has been in power and out of it, Amethi and Rae Bareli, separated by 62km (38 miles), have for the most part stood by the family. They’ve served as safe constituencies for India’s grand old party in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which is India’s largest electoral prize: with 80 seats out of the nation’s total of 543 in the lower house of parliament.

In 2019, that tradition received a dramatic jolt when the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi – son of Rajiv – lost Amethi by 55,000 votes to Smriti Irani, a feisty minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which has been in power nationally since 2014. Rahul’s mother and former Congress chief, Sonia Gandhi, retained Rae Bareli for the party, the only seat it won in Uttar Pradesh as the BJP swept the nation, winning 303 seats overall.

Now, five years later, the towns are a tense microcosm of the national battle between the BJP and