84% votes for Rajiv Gandhi in 1981 Congress’s best Amethi win, 1977 loss its worst

In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP’s Smriti Irani defeated the then Amethi MP Rahul to become only the third non-Congress MP to represent the seat since it came into existence in 1967. Prior to that, the BJP had won the seat just once, in 1998, when its candidate Sanjay Singh, a former Congress leader, had clinched the poll.

The other non-Congress MP to have got elected from Amethi was the Janata Party’s Ravindra Pratap Singh, who won in the post-Emergency elections of 1977.

The Congress has won Amethi 11 times in the 14 Lok Sabha elections held for the seat till date. The first Congress candidate to win from Amethi was V D Bajpai in 1967, and then again in 1971. In 1977, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay Gandhi contested the seat for the first time, but lost. In 1980 though, Sanjay won his first Lok Sabha election from the seat. After he died months later, his elder brother Rajiv Gandhi won the seat in a bypoll.

Rajiv went on to clinch the Amethi constituency for three consecutive terms. After he was assassinated in 1991, Satish Sharma, a Gandhi family loyalist, took over the seat. He won it in the 1991 bypoll and the 1996 Lok Sabha elections, but was unable to retain it in the 1998 polls.

Making her electoral debut in the 1999 polls from Amethi, Sonia won the seat. She switched to neighbouring Rae Bareli in 2004, leaving the Amethi seat for her son Rahul’s electoral debut, who then won it three times, in 2004, 2009 and 2014, before his shock defeat in 2019 at the hands of Irani.

In terms of vote share, the Congress has been dominant in Amethi, securing more than 50% of the votes in eight polls. Rajiv won the highest vote share on record in Amethi in the 1981 bypoll at 84.18%. The party’s worst performance was in 1998, when it secured just 31.1% of the votes polled.

How Amethi voted in past elections.

Amethi’s first Lok Sabha poll in 1967 was also the tightest contest in terms of votes polled with just 2.07 percentage points separating the Congress winner from runner-up Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), the BJP’s erstwhile avatar. It was also the lowest winning vote share secured by the Congress.

In 1977, the first time the Congress lost the Amethi seat, it won just 34.47% of the vote, well behind the Janata Party’s 60.47%. In its other losses in 1998 and 2019, the contest was much closer, with 3.98 percentage points and 5.87 percentage points, respectively, separating the Congress from the winning BJP.

Since the 1990s, the BJP has been the Congress’s primary rival in Amethi, although the BSP finished as the runner-up in the seat in 2004 and 2009.

Its Lok Sabha performances notwithstanding, the Congress has slipped behind the BJP in the last two UP Assembly polls in the seat. In the 2017 and 2022 state polls, the BJP won the highest combined vote share in the five Assembly segments that make up the Amethi parliamentary constituency. In 2017, the BJP secured 35.7% of the votes as against the Congress’s 24.4%. In 2022, the BJP extended its lead to 41.8%, followed by the Samajwadi Party (SP) at 35.2% and the Congress in third position with 14.3% votes.

In the 2022 Assembly polls, the Congress failed to win any of the segments in Amethi, with the BJP winning three seats and the SP two. In 2017, the BJP had won four seats and the SP one.