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

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 Raebareli seat results were reflective of the Congress’s waning influence in Uttar Pradesh overall, with the party winning just 2 seats and 2.3% of the votes in 2022.

The Congress’s worst performance was in 1996 and 1998, when it got less than 10% of the votes. But it bounced back in 1999, when Satish Sharma, a Gandhi family loyalist close to Rajiv and Sonia, was elected.

While in the 2000s, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) were the Congress’s main rivals in Raebareli, since 2014, the BJP has been the runner-up, securing 21.1% of the votes in 2014 and improving to 38.7% in 2019. Between the SP and BSP, while only the latter fielded a Raebareli candidate in 2014, neither party contested the seat in 2019.

However, while the Lok Sabha seat has firmly remained with the Congress, the story has been different in its Assembly segments in recent times.

In the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls, the Congress did not just lose in all the 5 Assembly segments in the Raebareli constituency, it finished third in 4 of them, and fourth in 1. The SP won in 4 of these segments, and the BJP that had fielded a former Congress MLA won 1. Across the 5 segments, the Congress secured just 13.2% of the vote share, well behind the SP at 37.6% and the BJP at 29.8%.

The Raebareli seat results were reflective of the Congress’s waning influence in Uttar Pradesh overall, with the party winning just 2 seats and 2.3% of the votes in 2022.

In the 2017 Assembly polls, the Congress and BJP had each won 2 Assembly segments of the Raebareli Lok Sabha seat, while the SP had won 1. The Congress had then secured the highest vote share across all the segments, at 31.2%, followed by the BJP at 27.8%. But the Congress’s overall seat tally in UP in 2017 too was abysmal, at total 7, with 6.2% of the vote share.

In 2012, when the SP had come to power in UP, and the Modi wave was yet to begin, 4 of the 5 Raebareli segments had been won by the debutant Peace Party of India. While the SP had secured a combined 30.8% of the votes across the 5 segments, the Congress was the runner-up with 21.7%, while the BJP trailed at 3.1%. Despite the poor performance in Raebareli’s Assembly segments, the Congress had fared better overall in UP, winning 28 seats and 11.7% of the votes.