As Sonia Gandhi vacates Raebareli, recent polls show Congress losing hold in seat

Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, after four consecutive terms as the Raebareli MP, is vacating the seat to contest the Rajya Sabha polls from Rajasthan. The party has won the Congress bastion in all but three Lok Sabha elections since 1951, and given its association with the constituency, one name doing the rounds as the new candidate of the party from Raebareli is Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.

Before Sonia, former PM Indira Gandhi had won from Raebareli three times. The constituency also elected Indira’s husband and Congress leader Feroze Gandhi twice, in 1952 and 1957; while former PM Jawaharlal Nehru’s grandnephew Arun Nehru won from Raebareli in a 1980 bypoll and in 1984. In 1989 and 1991, Sheila Kaul, Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister-in-law, won from the seat. A member of the Nehru-Gandhi family has not contested the seat just twice, in 1962 and 1999.

The three times the Congress has lost Raebareli since Independence has been once in the post-Emergency elections, when Indira was defeated by the Janata Party’s Raj Narain, and in 1996 and 1998, when Indira’s cousins Vikram Kaul and Deepa Kaul lost to the BJP, and non-Congress coalition governments briefly came to power at the Centre.

The Congress has also won by big margins from the seat, with its vote share less than a third in only 6 elections out of the 17 since the first Lok Sabha polls in 1951. The party has secured more than 50% of the votes eight times, including all four elections fought by Sonia. The Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson has also recorded the highest vote share won by a candidate from the seat, at 72.2% in 2009, the year the UPA government returned to power at the Centre.

The Congress’s worst performance was in 1996 and 1998, when it got less than