In Rae Bareli, Congress Faces Threat To Its Last Uttar Pradesh Bastion

Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi has been elected from the constituency five consecutive times.

A Congress bastion since Independence, the constituency of Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh has been won by former party president Sonia Gandhi five consecutive times. Mrs Gandhi has decided not to contest again and has been elected to the Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan, leaving the bastion vulnerable after another seemingly impregnable fortress, Amethi, had been won by the BJP in 2019.

Since the first Lok Sabha election in 1951-52, which was won by Sonia Gandhi's father-in-law Feroze Gandhi, the Congress has won 17 out of 20 Lok Sabha elections/by-elections in the constituency. The only exceptions were in 1977, when Indira Gandhi lost the election to a Janata Dal candidate after the Emergency was lifted, and the BJP's Ashok Singh won twice in the 1990s.

A member of the Nehru-Gandhi family has always fought the seat, except in 1962 and 1999, and speculation has been rife that Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra may make her electoral debut from there this year. The two other principal parties in Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, have never won the seat.

How The Numbers Stack Up