14 years an MP, now ‘ex’, Varun Gandhi’s long wait gets longer

Varun Gandhi has been here before, face to face with this question for perhaps as long as he can think back – where does he go next?

Denied a ticket by the BJP, the 43-year-old on Thursday released a letter to the voters of the Pilibhit Lok Sabha seat, which he won in 2019. He talked about visiting the constituency for the first time in 1983 as “a three-year-old child… holding my mother’s hand”, and ended with a promise, “not as an MP but as a son”, to serve it “all my life”.

He made no mention of the BJP or of the candidate who has replaced him from the seat, Jitin Prasada.

Thus, the Nehru-Gandhi outsider always looking in, and the BJP insider always looking out, was again the man who fell somewhere in between.

There has been no word from the BJP on why Varun has stayed out while his mother Maneka Gandhi has been repeated from Sultanpur, though both have been out of the party leadership’s good books for some time. One of the longest-serving parliamentarians currently, with eight Lok Sabha wins, Maneka did not find a place in the Narendra Modi-II ministry.

Like always, there were voices from the Congress side inviting Varun to cross over to the party of the Nehru-Gandhis – but not from the family itself. In light of their silence, it matters little that Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the Congress’s leader in the outgoing Lok Sabha, went public saying Varun should join the Congress.

Varun, who was surely not taken completely by surprise at the ticket denial, given how he has been baiting the BJP leadership for several years now, seems to have suddenly opted for silence.

Attempts to reach him failed.

The incident that would change the trajectory of Varun’s life happened just three months into his birth, on June 23, 1980, when his father