As Uttar Pradesh enters the fifth phase of polling during the general elections, several high profile constituencies are going to polls. These include traditional congress bastions like Amethi and Rae Bareli, as well as other important constituencies like Lucknow and Faizabad.
Amethi:
Amethi has so far been considered the safest seat for the Congress. It has been represented by Sanjay Gandhi (1980), Rajiv Gandhi (1981-1991), Sonia Gandhi (1999-2004) and since then by Rahul Gandhi. This time incumbent Rahul Gandhi faces his former adversary actor-turned-politician Smriti Irani again. Last time Gandhi had defeated Irani by a margin of over 1 lakh votes, but his vote share had dropped from over 70 percent in 2009 to just over 46 percent in 2014.
Amethi is a prestige seat and the Nehru-Gandhi family cannot afford to lose it. Interestingly, the SP-BSP Mahagathbandhan has not fielded any candidate from this constituency. While 7.31 per cent of the population identifies as Muslim, 18.9 per cent belong to scheduled castes according to 2011 census data.
Rae Bareli:
Another Congress bastion, this is Sonia Gandhi’s constituency. She has held it since 2004. Before her two other members of her family namely, Firoz Gandhi and Indira Gandhi have won from this constituency. Though Sonia Gandhi secured well over 5 lakh votes in the previous election from across religious and caste lines, it is noteworthy that the Congress has been losing assembly polls here since 2007.
While 12.3 per cent of the population identifies as Muslim, over 30 per cent belong to Scheduled Castes. The constituency has over 2 lakh voters from the Vaish community that had overwhelmingly voted for BJP’s previous candidate Ajay Agarwal in 2014. Agarwal had managed to secure the maximum number of votes ever by an opponent of Sonia Gandhi, totalling over 1.73 lakhs, from this constituency. But the BJP dropped him in favour of Dinesh Pratap Singh. Meanwhile, the Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party (Lohiya) has fielded Ram Singh Yadav.
Lucknow:
The constituency is associated with deceased BJP heavyweight Atal Bihari Vajpayee who won the seat five times consecutively since 1991. Even after Vajpayee stepped out of active politics, the seat has remained with the BJP with Lalji Tandon winning in 2009 and Rajnath Singh getting elected in 2014.
This time though, it will be an interesting triangular contest with Singh going up against the INC’s Pramod Krishnam and Samajwadi Party’s Poonam Sinha. Lucknow is also interesting as it is a very demographically diverse constituency. According to census data, over 21 per cent of people are Muslim and over 20 per cent belong to Scheduled Castes.
Faizabad:
This is another important parliamentary constituency as it is home to Ayodhya, the temple town where the Babri Mosque was razed to the ground in 1992. Key election issues here include unemployment, absence of proper healthcare facilities as well as the shut-down of small businesses due to economic slowdown. The constituency has changed hands and everyone from the BJP, INC, SP, BSP and even the Communist Party of India have come to power here.
The incumbent is BJP’s Lallu Singh who is facing Anand Sen Yadav of the Samajwadi Party and also curiously Mahesh Tiwari of the Shiv Sena, the sons-of-the-soil party from Maharashtra that now has national expansion ambitions. The INC has fielded veteran Dr Nirmal Khatri who had won the seat in 2009. And though no VIP really represents the constituency, the age old demand for construction of a Ram Temple makes the deity the VIP here.
According to Census data, while just over 9 per cent of the people belong to Scheduled Castes, over 28 per cent identify as Muslim, making this a very diverse constituency.